For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.

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

The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.

Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the aesthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture

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

To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow. Invasions can be arrested or modified in a manner to keep an area usable either for recreation, science or for wildlife, but the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible. It follows, then, that any wilderness program is a rearguard action, through which retreats are reduced to a minimum.