The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.

A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of his land.

All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.

There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.

Third, there is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called 'sportsmanship'. Our tools for the pursuit of wildlife improve faster than we do, and sportsmanship is the voluntary limitation in the use of these armaments. It is aimed to augment the role of skill and shrink the role of Gadgets in the pursuit of wild things.

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.

Conservationists have, I fear, adopted the pedagogical method of the prophets: we mutter darkly about impending doom if people don't mend their ways. The doom is impending, all right; no one can be an ecologist, even an amateur one, without seeing it. But do people mend their ways for fear of calamity? I doubt it. They are more likely to do it out of pure curiosity and interest.