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

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!

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.

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

In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.