There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.

In wildness is the salvation of the world.

We Americans, in most states at least, have not yet experienced a bear-less, eagle-less, cat- less, wolf-less woods. Germany strove for maximum yields of both timber and game and got neither.

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.

One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.

Wilderness, then, assumes unexpected importance as a laboratory for the study of land - health.

If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.