Quotes About Awareness

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.

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.

We grieve only for what we know.

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 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 only true development in American recreational resources is the development of the perceptive faculty in Americans. All of the other acts we grace by that name are, at best, attempts to retard or mask the process of dilution.

A March morning is only as drab as he who walks in it without a glance skyward.

One of the penalties of an ecological education, is that one lives alone in a world of wounds." Aldo Leopold (although I would personally strike out 'alone', thankfully)

I am convinced that most Americans of the new generation have no idea what a decent forest looks like. The only way to tell them is to show them.

Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another

Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.

To love what was is a new thing under the sun, unknown to most people and to all pigeons.

If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where the heat comes from...

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

Um dos castigos impostos por uma educação ecológica é viver solitariamente em um mundo ferido. Para um leigo, muitos dos danos causados à Terra são invisíveis. Um ecologista deve se embrutecer e fazer de conta que não tem nada a ver com as consequências da ciência, ou deve ser como um médico que vê marcas da morte em uma comunidade que acredita estar saudável e não quer ser convencida do contrário.

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.

Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.

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

Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth?

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.

The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.