Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them

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

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!

An Ecologist lives in a world of wounds.

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.

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

Twenty centuries of 'progress' have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account, and a high opinion of himself, but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment, nor a conviction that such capacity, rather than such density, is the true test of whether he is civilized.