I am asserting that those who love the wilderness should not be wholly deprived of it, that while the reduction of the wilderness has been a good thing, its extermination would be a very bad one, and that the conservation of wilderness is the most urgent and difficult of all the tasks that confront us, because there are no economic laws to help and many to hinder its accomplishment.

The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.

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.

Teach the student to see the land, understand what he sees, and enjoy what he understands.

Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?

No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.

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