wilderness16 quotes

“If the life of natural things, millions of years old, does not seem sacred to us, then what can be sacred?”

“If you desire to know, feel and live the desert, as opposed to only looking at it as tourists and art critics do, you’ve got to arise from your bottom end and walk upright like a human being, alone or with a friend, into the ancient blood-thrilling primeval freedom of those vast and democratic vistas. You will never understand the secret essence of the word freedom until you do.”

“One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am: a reluctant enthusiast, a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to your body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.”

“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.”

“I’m addicted to the entire planet. I don’t want to leave it. I want to get down into it. I want to say hello. On the beach, I could have stopped all day long and looked at those damned shells, looked for all the messages that come not in bottles but in shells.”

“It is good conservation practice, if you are going to develop, to concentrate people and leave wild land around them. People need earning territory—territory they have to earn by walking, limping, crawling, or whatever they can do.”

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic, as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”

“As the last of the night cupped the river in its hands, Petschek knew in his heart that it was simply impossible to come away from an extended encounter with the greatest canyon on earth without acknowledging that human life, despite its frailty and insignificance, represents a bestowal of grace for which one has done nothing whatsoever to deserve—and that for this reason, the river world vibrated with a harrowing beauty whose principal dividends were gratitude and joy.”

“The prescription I’ve come to seems to be this. Know the heaven and earth that were, but experience the world that is.”

“The feeling of satisfaction, accomplishment, and relaxation after a day on a good horse breathing fresh air in unspoiled country is a great tonic to body and soul.”

“To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told—that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.”

“It is not given to every soul pining for the natural world to be a naturalist. Most of us require a game to play, whether hunting, birdwatching, angling, or sailing, and each creates superb opportunities to observe the weather, the land under changing light, the movement of water.”

“The trajectory of compound growth shows that the scouring of the planet has only just begun. As the volume of the global economy expands, everywhere that contains something concentrated, unusual, precious will be sought out and exploited, its resources extracted and dispersed, the world’s diverse and differentiated marvels reduced to the same grey stubble.”

“I will follow my instincts, be myself for good or ill, and see what will be the upshot. As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.”

“Depending on what happens to human societies, we will spend the next few generations coming to terms with what we have lost...We won’t know most of what we have lost because it will have never been named. Some of the species we will have lost will have had important medicinal values. Some of them will have pollinated our crops. Some of them will have been strange creatures deserving explanation. Some will have been beautiful. Some will have had values that we are not yet capable of understanding.

We live in a vast living museum that is being flooded and burned and ravaged. We know that we must save some of the art, but we don’t know anything about the art. So we grab the showiest things and hope they are important.”

“I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places...I should not like to think some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth.”