wilderness conservation Quotes

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.

As United Nations patron of the wilderness, one of my roles is to report back from the Earth's remaining wildernesses and to act as a voice for the wild.

Wilderness, like the national park system, was an American idea.

Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.

The only thing left worth saving is wilderness.

Inspired by John Muir's A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, John Davis walks, bikes, and kayaks on a 'voyage of recovery' from the Florida Keys to southeastern Canada. He bears witness not only to wilderness that still sustains bears, panthers, and bobcats but also to the possibilities for connecting further wildways in the eastern United States. His inspiring journey reminds us all that we must rediscover the wildness we still have before we lose it forever.

The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.

To this day, I enjoy nature, the luxury of undisturbed wilderness, forests, mountains, lakes, rivers and deserts and their wildlife. But I also know that the greatest danger to their perpetuity is the pressure of human population.

The wild places are where we began. When they end, so do we.

While endangering one of the most pristine areas in the world, drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would do nothing to make our country more energy independent.

May this continent, the last explored by humankind, be the first one to be spared by humankind.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow. Invasions can be arrested or modified in a manner to keep an area usable either for recreation, science or for wildlife, but the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible. It follows, then, that any wilderness program is a rearguard action, through which retreats are reduced to a minimum.

I dream of our vast deserts, of our forests, of all our great wildernesses. We must never forget that it is our duty to protect this environment.

How much wilderness do the wilderness-lovers want? ask those who would mine and dig and cut and dam in such sanctuary spots as these. The answer is easy: Enough so that there will be in the years ahead a little relief, a little quiet, a little relaxation, for any of our increasing millions who need and want it.

If we human beings learn to see the intricacies that bind one part of a natural system to another and then to us, we will no longer argue about the importance of wilderness protection, or over the question of saving endangered species, or how human communities must base their economic futures - not on short-term exploitation - but on long-term, sustainable development.

What little wilderness remains displays the patterns we must return to, if our species and as many others as now remain are to persist here a while. Ideally this would call for a broad cultural rapprochment with the wild, a long overdue armistice in civilization's war upon it.

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.

Cherish your wilderness.

The Indians, they don't fully understand that a lot of the things that they currently take for granted on those lands, they won't be able to do if it's made clearly into a monument or a wilderness. Once you put a monument there, you do restrict a lot of things that could be done, and that includes use of the land... Just take my word for it.

Why should not we, who have renounced the king's authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be "civilized off the face of the earth," - our forests, not to hold the king's game merely, but to hold and preserve the king himself also, the lord of creation, - not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true re-creation?

All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow... the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.

I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving.

It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these western woods ... Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ's time-and long before that-God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools.

God’s great wilderness is the hope of the world.