Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.

Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.

Prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind; I have no hope for conservation born of fear.

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.

There is yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.

No one would rather hunt woodcock in October than I, but since learning of the sky dance I find myself calling one or two birds enough. I must be sure that, come April, there be no dearth of dancers in the sunset sky.

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.