We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way.

Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.

Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.

I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .

Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.

I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me.