Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.

It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines... a curious transfusion of courage.

Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.

The government tells us we need flood control and comes to straighten the creek in our pasture. The engineer on the job tells us the creek is now able to carry off more flood water, but in the process we have lost our old willows where the owl hooted on a winter night and under which the cows switched flies in the noon shade. We lost the little marshy spot where our fringed gentians bloomed.

To those who know the speech of hills and rivers straightening a stream is like shipping vagrants—a very successful method of passing trouble from one place to the next. It solves nothing in any collective sense.

The life of every river sings its own song, but in most the song is long marred by the discords of misuse.

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.