Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of.

We realize the indivisibility of the earth - its soil, mountains, rivers, forests, climate, plants, and animals - and respect it collectively not only as a useful servant but as a living being, vastly less alive than ourselves in degree, but vastly greater than ourselves in time and space - a being that was old when the morning stars sang together, and when the last of us has been gathered unto his fathers, will still be young.

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

What a dull world if we knew all about geese!

Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.

To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs.

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.