Homesickness is a great teacher. It taught me, during an endless rainy fall, that I came from the arid lands, and like where I came from. I was used to dry clarity and sharpness in the air. I was used to horizons that either lifted into jagged ranges or rimmed the geometrical circle of the flat world. I was used to seeing a long way. I was used to earth colors--tan, rusty red, toned white--and the endless green of Iowa offended me. I was used to a sun that came up over mountains and went down behind other mountains. I missed the color and smell of sagebrush, and the sight of bare ground.

We are the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.

You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you're very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.

To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.

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

Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

We need wilderness preserved-as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds-because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.