258 Quotes About Conservation

.., the modern American, particularly in Texas and the Southwest, talks progressive, but he votes conservative. He assails Washington and all its works, but demands more than his share of federal money; indeed the Southwest only exists at all thanks to federal spending on water projects, without which it would go back to the desert within a year.

The spirit of the wild must pass to all of you now. You must tell each one you meet: if you would find Pan, take up Pan's spirit. Remake the wild, a little at a time, each in your own corner of the world. You cannot wait for anyone else, even a god, to do that for you.

Ecologist Paul Ehrlich stressed that people who hold opposing opinions need to engage in open discussion with well-reasoned dissent. Positions should be questioned and criticized, not the people who hold them. Personal attacks preclude open discussion because, once someone is put on the defensive, fruitful exchanges are impossible, at least for the moment.

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.

We shall never fully understand nature (or ourselves), and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability - however innocent and harmless the use. For it is the general uselessness of so much of nature that lies at the root of our ancient hostility and indifference to it.

Longtime rural farmers and ranchers are used to people coming into their living rooms to tell them what they should do with their land. They tend to be very polite and patient. Insurance brokers, government agents, zoning administrators, and now conservationists all have ideas to which generations of ranchers have listened.

Age in itself gives substance — what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer’s mind.

Water problems in the western United States, when viewed from afar, can seem tantalizingly easy to solve: all we need to do is turn off the fountains at the Bellagio, stop selling hay to China, ban golf, cut down the almond trees, and kill all the lawyers.

I wish people had as much enthusiasm about unfucking the planet as they did about sports. Who wins on Sunday is pretty goddamned trivial compared to just about anything else.