The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.

On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow.

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.

We face the question whether a still higher "standard of living" is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.

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

In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.