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

We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all.

There are men charged with the duty of examining the construction of the plants, animals, and soils which are the instruments of the great orchestra. These men are called professors. Each selects one instrument and spends his life taking it apart and describing its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called research. The place for dismemberment is called a university.

Agricultural science is largely a race between the emergence of new pests and the emergence of new techniques for their control.

Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.

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 of replacement in as many decades.

Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.