Quotes About Stewardship

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .

National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed.

For somehow, against probability, some sort of indigenous, recognizable culture has been growing on western ranches and in western towns and even in western cities. It is the product not of the boomers but of the stickers, not of those who pillage and run but of those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.

You can't just let nature run wild.

Education, if it means anything, should not take people away from the land, but instill in them even more respect for it, because educated people are in a position to understand what is being lost. The future of the planet concerns all of us, and all of us should do what we can to protect it. As I told the foresters, and the women, you don't need a diploma to plant a tree.

A rich person should leave his kids enough to do something, but not enough to do nothing.

It is a great thing when I discover I am no longer my own but His. If the ten shillings in my pocket belong to me, then I have full authority over them. But if they belong to another who has committed them to me in trust, then I cannot buy what I please with them, and I dare not lose them. Real Christian life begins with knowing this.

To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.

The ecological teaching of the Bible is simply inescapable: God made the world because He wanted it made. He thinks the world is good, and He loves it. It is His world; He has never relinquished title to it. And He has never revoked the conditions, bearing on His gift to us of the use of it, that oblige us to take excellent care of it.

Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.

Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land's inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows. These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery.

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children. (Actually appearing as "a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children" in _The Unforeseen Wilderness: An Essay on Kentucky's Red River Gorge_, published 1971)

Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.

one planet doesn't matter.

As we search for a less extractive and polluting economic order, so that we may fit agriculture into the economy of a sustainable culture, community becomes the locus and metaphor for both agriculture and culture.

Everything we have is not ours. And it will be inherited by another for a short time."

God has a paradise because he takes care of the garden.

Leaders are, therefore, caretakers of the interests and well-being of those and the purposes they serve.

while God has done his part in creating a world capable of providing what we need, we have not done our part in the stewardship of it, in seeing that it gets to the end of the line, to the poorest and neediest--the children.

Our ability to create has outreached our ability to use wisely the products of our invention.

money isn't just physical; it's a spiritual reality. It's "spiritual" in that it isn't about folded pieces of paper, and it isn't about what those little slips of paper can buy. It is about people and relationships. Money is the buzz; the connection that makes our interpersonal networks rich and fulfilling.

If we treat our forests right, we can at least ameliorate the declines in forest extent and diversity and the consequent impoverishment of the aesthetic, economic, climatic, and spiritual benefits we count on from them.