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

I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creel, but my memory.

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.

I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written'… It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.

Agricultural science is largely a race between the emergence of new pests and the emergence of new techniques for their control.

Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.

I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.