Quotes About Nature

What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education.

At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.

There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of those who cannot

He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowing. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.

It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it.

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.

To those who know the speech of hills and rivers straightening a stream is like shipping vagrants—a very successful method of passing trouble from one place to the next. It solves nothing in any collective sense.

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That lands yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.

The boundary between tame and wild exists only in the imperfections of the human mind.

Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you.

The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a place to compete for). The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes

The evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual as well as emotional process.

Never did we plan the morrow, for we had learned that in the wilderness some new and irresistible distraction is sure to turn up each day before breakfast. Like the river, we were free to wander.

never had there been so rare a day, or so rich a solitude top spend it in.

The months of the year, from January up to June, are a geometric progression in the abundance of distractions.

There is value in any experience that reminds us of our dependency on the soil-plant-animal-man food chain [...] Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relation with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry. Time was when education moved toward soil, not away from it.

The enthusiasm of geese for high water is a subtle thing, and might be overlooked by those unfamiliar with goose gossip...

What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked.

Camp-keeping in the Delta was not all beer and skittles.

Do not let anyone tell you that these people made work of play. They simply realized that the most fun lies in seeing and studying the unknown.

it is disquieting to feel that the conversion into a National Forest or Park always means the esthetic death of a piece of wild country.