The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community, and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people.

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

Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.

When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: He could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker: He could chop it down. Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants.

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.

Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.

It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it