Quotes About Conservation

Toda protección de la vida salvaje está condenada al fracaso, porque para querer necesitamos ver y acariciar y cuando un número suficiente de gente haya visto y acariciado no quedará nada que querer.

It might be wise to prohibit at once all teaching of real botany and real history, lest some future citizen suffer qualms about the floristic price of his good life.

Solitude, the one natural resource still undowered of alphabets, is so far recognized as valuable only by ornithologists and cranes.

I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.

There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.

Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

We shall never achieve harmony with the land, anymore than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.

All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.

Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of the land.

I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail for replacement in as many decades

Today's water arguments reflect a growing unease about how to proceed when old certainties are being pushed aside and new options seem limited or unappealing. But the stark warnings implicit in Wisconsin's poisoned wells, the intersex and dying fish of Chesapeake Bay, Lake Mead's recored-low waterline, the decay of levees across the country, and the resource war in Alaska's Bristol Bay, cannot be ignored.

Well, what I tried to do is simply to get out on the land. And when I came to Washington, I think one of the mistakes we made early on was kind of having an ideological dispute up in the Congress.

The waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity.

Every other civilized nation in the world has been compelled to care for its forests, and so must we if waste and destruction are not to go on to the bitter end, leaving America as barren as Palestine or Spain.

Plastic waste is now found in the most remote areas of the planet. It kills marine life and is doing major harm to communities that depend on fishing and tourism.

Waste paper is like a forest - paper recycles itself, generation after generation.

I think developed countries - so-called developed countries - should reflect upon the way of living and the waste of energy.