The Sierra Club is a very good and a very powerful force for conservation and, as a matter of fact, has grown faster since I left than it was growing while I was there! It must be doing something right.

Politicians are like weather vanes. Our job is to make the wind blow.

Some otherwise sane scientists have seriously proposed that we tuck this deadly garbage under the edges of drifting continents but how can they be sure the moving land masses will climb over the waste and not just push it forward?

Polite conservationists leave no mark save the scars upon the Earth that could have been prevented had they stood their ground.

True wilderness is where you keep it, and real wilderness experience cannot be a sedentary one; you have to seek it out not seated, but afoot.

Let the mountains talk, let the river run. Once more, and forever.

If I could go back to a point in history to try to get things to come out differently, I would go back and tell moses to go up the mountain again and get the other tablet. Because the Ten Commandments just tell us what we are supped to do with one another, not a word about our relationship to the earth. Genesis starts with these commands: multiply, replenish the earth, and subdue it. We have multiplied very well, we have replenished our populations very well, we have subdued it all too well, and we don't have any other instruction.