Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing.

He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.

When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: He could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker: He could chop it down. Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants.

Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

A river or stream is a cycle of energy from sun to plants to insects to fish. It is a continuum broken only by humans.