It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.

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.

How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook!

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

All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.

The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations