Quotes About Conservation

How little we really know about the life all around us. Would we be so cavalier and ruthless with it if we understood it better?

Koch was not one for grand plans. He just made constant adjustments. He always used the word 'stewardship' to describe his leadership style. He'd inherited something great and he didn't screw it up. p259

We don't inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.

This island of Earth of ours is finite in resources, including wilderness- particularly wilderness. The dwindling worldwide reservoir of wild lands must be the concern of everyone, but especially of those of us who have been privileged to experience wildness, and thus learn its value to the individual human soul and to the spirit of mankind.

Thoreau asked long ago, "What's the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?" We

Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert, Rick Bass's The Watch, Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge, Charles Bowden's Red Line, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Doug Peacock's Grizzly Years, and Pam Houston's Cowboys Are My Weakness.

As far back as 1912, John Muir had protested against the building of the Hetch Hetchy Dam with these words: "These temple destroyers, devotees of raging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.

You never really "won" an environmental battle, after all, just saved places that would be fought over again in the future.

Environmentalism or conservation or preservation, or whatever it should be called, is not a fact, and never has been. It is a job.

Naomi noted in closing that Britain had one of the "most staunchly conservation-oriented publics ... they are strongly antiwhaling ... they are an island nation who feel they must protect the marine environment." Yet there were zero cetacean displays left in the UK. "Clearly they are getting their marine education, their marine ethic, from some other source.

BP has put more birds in oil than Colonel Sanders.

Single tusks vary in weight from 1 lb. to 165 lbs.: the average of a pair of tusks may be put at 28 lbs., and therefore 44,000 elephants, large and small, must be killed yearly to supply the ivory which comes to England alone, and when we remember that an enormous quantity goes to America, to India and China, for consumption there, and of which we have no account, some faint notion may be formed of the destruction that goes on amongst the herds of elephants.

One frequently hears that there are not enough places for people to go. But where do we not go? We are too many and tread too heavily. (Perhaps the world is to blame for being too small.)

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.

We should have no concern for the environment, because, after the great flood with Noah, God promised that He would never ruin the earth again.

God bless America. Let's try to save some of it.

All abuse and waste of God's creatures are spoil and robbery on the property of the Creator.

We cannot fulfill that purpose [environmentalism] if we are heaping contempt on God's creation.

Caring for God's endowment in a thrifty fashion is a form of biblical obedience.

The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal.

A great challenge: stop ruining the garden which God has entrusted to us so that all may enjoy it.

Trails need to be reconstructed. Please avoid building trails that go uphill.

In particular, the emerging call from our nation's evangelicals to protect God's creation is substantial

Conservation is the application of common sense to the common problems for the common good.