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

Every farm woodland, in addition to yielding lumber, fuel and posts, should provide its owner a liberal education. This crop of wisdom never fails, but it is not always harvested.

Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.

If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

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

I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end result of a life journey.