“If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.”

The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease.

Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can’t be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief…

The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes.

I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself… something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.

I’m a writer more than I am a talker.

We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.

When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while, you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn.

A longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

The ecosystems, the ecosphere, those are good gifts.

I’ve had a good life, and was born to and among people I’ve admired and loved.

To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.

And to take good care of it, we have to know it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.

It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.

Why should conservationists have a positive interest in… farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.

Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can’t be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.