Quotes About Conservationists

If education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new. Youth yet unborn will pole up the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or climb the Sierras with James Capen Adams, and each generation in turn will ask: Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren't looking.

Unsportsmanlike predator-killing is always rationalized as defence of property—usually someone else's property. This excuse is getting too thin to pass muster among thinking conservationists.

As I stood, I took in a last breath of spring-scented air, listened to the birdsong, and then saw a member of wildlife the conservationists hadn't planned on reviving in this place. A perv in a white shirt and polyester pants. A standard hide-in-the-bushes-and-whack-it perv. Fat and balding, it was as appealing as watching a giant marshmallow go at it.

Conservationists who want to cosset nature like a delicate flower, to protect it from the threat of alien species, are the ethnic cleansers of nature, neutralizing the forces that they should be promoting.

Ranchers are midwives, hunters, nurturers, providers, and conservationists all at once. What we've interpreted as toughness—weathered skin, calloused hands, a squint in the eye and a growl in the voice—only masks the tenderness inside.

It's when the conservationists became environmentalists that everything went bad. It stopped being about the environment. It became about controlling society.

In Central Virginia, farmers are some of our strongest conservationists. They understand the complex ecosystems they inhabit, and they cherish the role they play as stewards of the land.