I thought I would share the following words on man’s role in the natural world….our place in the scheme of things in Mother Nature:
We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there…. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope. – Edward Abbey
The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth … the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need — if only we had the eyes to see. — Edward Abbey (controversial American writer and naturalist)
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. — Edward Abbey (controversial American writer and naturalist)
The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone — and to no one. — Edward Abbey (controversial American writer and naturalist)
A land not mine, still forever memorable, the watchers of its ocean chill and fresh.
Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk, and the air drunk, like wine, late sun lays bare the rosy limbs of the pine trees.
Sunset in the ethereal waves: I cannot tell if the day is ending, or the world, or if the secrets of secrets is inside me again. — Ann Akmatova (Russian poet)
Humanity is cutting down its forests, apparently oblivious to the fact that we may not be able to live without them. — Isaac Asimov (Russian-American science fiction writer, essayist, and biochemist)
Man is not himself only… He is all that he sees; all that flows to him from a thousand sources… He is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the reach of its valleys. — Mary Austin (Inyo writer)
No beast has ever conquered the earth; and the natural world has never been conquered by muscular force. — Liberty Hyde Baily
No site in the forest is without significance, not a glade, not a thicket that does not provide analogies to the labyrinth of human thoughts. Who among those people with a cultivated spirit, or whose heart has been wounded, can walk in a forest without the forest speaking to him?… If one searched for the causes of that sensation, at once solemn, simple, gentle, mysterious, that seizes one, perhaps it would be found in the sublime and ingenious spectacle of all the creatures obeying their destinies, immutably docile. — Honore de Balzac (French realist writer)
Nature includes all of the universe and man is not only a part of nature, he is in it up to his neck. – N.J. Berrill (science writer)
The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer (German theologian)
There are no idealists in the plant world and no compassion. The rose and the morning glory know no mercy. Bindweed, the morning glory, will quickly choke its competitors to death, and the fencerow rose will just as quietly crowd out any other plant that tried to share its roothold. Idealism and mercy are human terms and human concepts. — Hal Borland (American writer)
A root, a stem, a leaf, some means of capturing sunlight and air and making food — in some, a plant. The green substance of the earth, the chlorophyll, is all summed up in the plants. Without them we perish, all of us who are flesh and blood. — Hal Borland (American writer)
If we are to have broad-thinking men and women of high mentality, of good physique and with a true perspective on life, we must allow our populace a communion with nature in areas of more or less wilderness condition. — Arthur Carhart (U.S. Forest Service official and pioneer in wilderness preservation movement)
I held a blue flower in my hand, probably a wild aster, wondering what its name was, and then thought that human names for natural things are superfluous. Nature herself does not name them. The important thing is to know this flower, look at its color until the blends becomes as real as a keynote of music. Look at the exquisite yellow flowerettes at the center, become very small with them. Be the flower, be the trees, the blowing grasses. Fly with the birds, jump with a squirrel! — Sally Carrighar (American nature writer), from Home to the Wilderness
Never a day passes but that I do myself the honor to commune with some of nature’s varied forms. — George Washington Carver (African-American botanist, invented hundreds of uses for the peanut)
The great purpose is to set aside a reasonable part of the vanishing wilderness, to make certain that generations of Americans yet unborn will know what it is to experience life on undeveloped, unoccupied land in the same form and character as the Creator fashioned it… It is a great spiritual experience. I never knew a man who took a bedroll into an Idaho mountainside and slept there under a star-studded summer sky who felt self-important that next morning. Unless we preserve some opportunity for future generations to have the same experience, we shall have dishonored our trust. – Frank Church (Democratic Idaho Senator, 1957-1981))
Believe one who knows; you will find something greater in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters. — St. Bernard de Clairvaux (French abbott and primary builder of the Cistercian monastic order)
And what joy, think ye, did they feel after the exceedingly long and troublous ascent?- after scrambling, pulling, pushing lifting, gasping, looking, hoping, despairing, climbing, holding on, falling off, trying, puffing, loosing, gathering, talking, stepping, grumbling, anathematising, scraping, hacking, bumping, jogging, overturning, hunting, straddling, – for know ye that by these methods alone are the most divine mysteries of the Quest revealed? – Prof. Norman Collie, Scottish Mountaineering Journal, 1894
Men go back to the mountains, as they go back to sailing ships at sea, because in the mountains and on the sea they must face up, as did men of another age, to the challenge of nature. Modern man lives in a highly synthetic kind of existence. He specializes in this and that. Rarely does he test all his powers or find himself whole. But in the hills and on the water the character of a man comes out. — Abram T. Collier
Man is whole when he is in tune with the winds, the stars, and the hills… Being in tune with the universe is the entire secrets. — William O. Douglas (U.S. Supreme Court Justice)
….. to be whole and harmonious, man must also know the music of the beaches and the woods. He must find the thing of which he is only an infinitesimal part and nurture it and love it, if he is to live. — William O. Douglas (U.S. Supreme Court Justice), 1960
Is not the sky a father and the earth a mother, and are not all living things with feet or wings or roots their children? — Black Elk (Medicine man of the Lakota (Sioux)
Give me the strength to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is! — Black Elk (Medicine man of the Lakota (Sioux)
Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beheath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy… — Black Elk (Medicine man of the Lakota (Sioux)
In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child. — Ralph Waldo Emerson (American writer and philosopher and co-founder of Transcendental Club)
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. – Ralph Waldo Emerson (American writer and philosopher and co-founder of Transcendental Club)
To the dull mind nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light. – Ralph Waldo Emerson (American writer and philosopher and co-founder of Transcendental Club)
The greatest wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more. — Ralph Waldo Emerson (American writer and philosopher and co-founder of Transcendental Club), from a conversation with John Muir
At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back. — Ralph Waldo Emerson (American writer and philosopher and co-founder of Transcendental Club)
No land is bad, but land is worse. If a man owns land, the land owns him. Now let him leave home, if he dare. — Ralph Waldo Emerson (American writer and philosopher and co-founder of Transcendental Club)
Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds have no title. — Ralph Waldo Emerson (American writer and philosopher and co-founder of Transcendental Club)
Plants are the young of the world. Vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect man, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground. — Ralph Waldo Emerson (American writer and philosopher and co-founder of Transcendental Club)
The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God…I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles. — Anne Frank (diarist and Holocaust victim)
The survival of the human species is inescapably linked with the survival of all other forms of life. – Michael Frome (American outdoor and environmental writer)
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step and trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a woods, and I – I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. – Robert Frost (American poet), The Road Not Taken
Acceptance is the art of making the obstacle the path. Therefore, embrace the enemy. This is the lesson of the river guide: face the danger, move toward it, that’s where the current is the strongest, and it will carry you around the obstacle. Use it. — China Galland (author of The Bond Between Women and Women in the Wilderness)
And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. — Kahlil Gibran (Lebanese-American artist, poet and writer)
Remember, you belong to Nature, not it to you. – Archibald Belaney, aka Grey Owl
Human beings, as a whole, deny to animals any credit for the power of thought, preferring not to hear about it and ascribing everything they do to instinct. Yet most species of animals can reason, and all men have instinct. Man is the highest of living creatures, but it does not follow a corollary that Nature belongs to him, as he so fondly imagines. He belongs to it. That he should take his share of the gifts she has so bountifully provided for her children, is only right and proper; but he cannot reasonably deny the other creatures a certain portion. They have to live too. – Grey Owl, Tales Of An Empty Cabin, pp. 325-26
There are many who walk through the woods like blind men. – Grey Owl, Tolerance
There is a great deal of talk these days about saving the environment. We must, for the environment sustains our bodies. But as humans we also require support for our spirits, and this is what certain kinds of places provide. The catalyst that converts any physical location — any environment if you will — into a place, is the process of experiencing deeply. A place is the piece of the whole environment that has been claimed by feelings. Viewed simply as a life-support system, the earth is an environment. Viewed as a resource that sustains our humanity, the earth is a collection of places. We never speak, for example, of an environment we have known; it is always places we have known — and recall. We are homesick for places, we are reminded of places, it is the sounds and smells and sights of places which haunt us and against which we often measure our present. — Alan Gussow (American artist, gardener and president of Friends of the Earth Foundation), from A Sense of Place
So rests the sky against the earth. The dark still tarn in the lap of the forest. As a husband embraces his wife’s body in faithful tenderness, so the bare ground and trees are embraced by this still, high, light of the morning.
I feel an ache of longing to share in this embrace, to be united and absorbed. A longing like carnal desire, but directed towards earth, water, sky, and returned by the whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the soil, the caresses of the wind, the embrace of water and light. Content? No, no, no — but refreshed, rested — while waiting. — Dag Hammarskjold (Swedish diplomat and second Secretary-General of the United Nations, winner of the 1961 Nobel Peace Prize)
Clambering up the Cold Mountain path, The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on: The long gorge choked with the scree and boulders, The wide creek, the midst-blurred grass. The moss is slippery, though there’s been no rain The pine sings, but there’s no wind. Who can lead the world’s ties And sit with me among the white clouds? – Han-shan (Mythological figure of 8th or 9th century Chinese Taoist/Zen poetry)
I have come to terms with the future. From this day onward I will walk easy on the earth. Plant trees. Kill no living things. Live in harmony with all creatures. I will restore the earth where I am. Use no more of its resources than I need. And listen, listen to what it is telling me. — M.J. Slim Hooey
We love quiet; we suffer the mouse to play; when the woods are rustled by the wind, we fear not. – Indian Chief, 1796, to the governor of Pennsylvania
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments – there are consequences. – R. G. Ingersoll
Her mighty lakes, like oceans of liquid silver; her mountains with their right aerial tints; her valleys, teeming with wild fertility; her tremendous cataracts, thundering in their solitudes; her boundless plains, waving with spontaneous verdure; her brought deep rivers, rolling in solemn silence to the ocean; her trackless forests, where vegetation puts forth all its magnificence; her skies, kindling waves in the magic of the summer clouds and glorious sunshine; — no, never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery. – Washington Irving (American author famous for Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow)
We must not only protect the country side and save it from destruction, we must resort what has been destroyed and salvage the beauty and charm of our cities… Once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature, his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted. — Lyndon B. Johnson (36th President of the United States)
Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another. – Juvenal, Satires
What a joy it is to feel the soft, springy earth under my feet once more, to follow grassy roads that lead to ferny brooks where I can bathe my fingers in a cataract of rippling notes, or to clamber over a stone wall into green fields that tumble and roll and climb in riotous gladness! — Helen Keller, from The Story of My Life
No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength. - Jack Kerouac
My heart is tuned to the quietness that the stillness of nature inspires. — Hazrat Inayat Khan (Indian Sufi teacher and founder of the Sufi Order in the West, now the Sufi Order International)
The wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit. – Joseph Wood Krutch (American writer, critic, and naturalist), 1958, from Today and All Its Yesterdays
The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast and you miss all you are traveling for. - Louis L’Amour
On a clear winter morning, just as the sun rises high enough for its slanting rays to shine horizontally through the trees, disclosing each branch and needle, backlit and rimmed with fire, each intricate facets of the snow crystals distinct and glittering, each contour and dip of the land plainly outlined by the conforming snow, I lay my track through the snow — a silent listener awaiting Being. And Being responds. I move so silently and swiftly that deer, rabbits, and weasels are surprised and caught him in their inner lives; so swiftly and silently they do not flee but stand out in their beings. Each tree-being, aspen and fir, lit from within, stands out. The shape of the land is shone forth more clearly than in the summer, when its contours are masked and hidden by vegetation. The earth more present, the sky more present, by, the human, more present in total awareness… — Dolores LaChapelle (American mountaineer, skier and leader in the deep ecology movement)
Man always kills the things he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map? — Aldo Leopold (American ecologist, forester, and environmentalist, considered to be father of American wildlife management)
Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in part, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words. — Aldo Leopold (American ecologist, forester, and environmentalist, considered to be father of American wildlife management)
The land, the earth God gave to man for his home…should never be the possession of any man, corporation, (or) society…any more than the air or water. — Abraham Lincoln (16th President of the United States)
In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia. — Charles A. Lindbergh (American aviator, flew first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic in 1927), December 22, 1967, from Life
Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation, in turn, becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on to the future. — Charles A. Lindbergh (American aviator, flew first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic in 1927), May 23, 1971, from New York Times Magazine
Park and open-space efforts can be described as an institutional reflection of the principal means by which urban man has historically engaged in the Edenic search. He has, since the beginnings of civilization, sought gardeners in his cities, a pastoral landscape outside of his cities, and wilderness for retreat away from his cities. Baghdad boasts a thousand gardens; Alexander set aside one quarter of his North African city as a park;…wilderness served as retreat for Jesus of Nazareth, as it did later for the Waldenisians and the Franciscans; and mediation in the wilderness is a common theme in Far Eastern cultures. Thus, there is good evidence that a prosperity for greenery as a substitute Eden in urban civilizations is not a particularity of any single race, religion, or national culture. — Charles E. Little (American author of The Dying of the Trees)
I have learned a lot from trees; Sometimes about the weather, Sometimes about animals, Sometimes about the Great Spirits. — Tatanga Mani “Walking Buffalo” (Chief of the Nakoda, medicine man, naturalist, and peace advocate)
For me and for thousands with similar inclinations, the most important passion of life is the overpowering desire to escape periodically from the clutches of a mechanistic civilization. To us the enjoyment of solitude, complete independence, and the beauty of undefiled panoramas is absolutely essential to happiness. — Bob Marshall (co-founder of the Wilderness Society)
The machine called Nature into an art form. For the first time at men began to regard Nature as a source of aesthetic and spiritual values. — Marshal McLuhan (Canadian philosopher and intellectual known for coining the phrases “the medium is the message” and “global village”)
I’d rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth. — Steve McQueen (movie actor)
The universe has been quite literally writing upon humans for many thousands of years, and our alphabets are among the traits that nature has carved in order to cross our minds. Wild lands have caught deeper trails in my life than I will ever be able to make in the forest. — Joe Meeker (American human ecolgist, host of the 1980′s NPR show Minding the Earth)
What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forests, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the bridges, and the talk of the water courses everywhere in the hollows!
Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen. — Thomas Merton (Trappist monk and Catholic theologian), from Rain and the Rhinoceros
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul. – John Muir
In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. – John Muir
Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean. – John Muir
One may as well dam for water tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man. – John Muir
Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you. – John Muir
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. – John Muir
The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best He ever planted. — John Muir (American naturalist and co-founder of the Sierra Club)
Like most other things not apparently useful to man, it has few friends, and the blind question “Why was it made?’ goes on and on, with never a guess that first of all it might have been made for itself. — John Muir (American naturalist and co-founder of the Sierra Club)
Society speaks and all men listen, mountains speak and wise men listen. — John Muir (American naturalist and co-founder of the Sierra Club)
I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown; for going out, I found, was really going in. — John Muir (American naturalist and co-founder of the Sierra Club)
I . . . am always glad to touch the living rock again and dip my hand in the high mountain air. – John Muir (American naturalist and co-founder of the Sierra Club)
Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom on the mountaineer…
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The wind will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. — John Muir (American naturalist and co-founder of the Sierra Club)
Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. — John Muir (American naturalist and co-founder of the Sierra Club)
Here is calm so deep, grasses cease waiting… wonderful how completely everything in wild nature fits into us, as if truly part and parent of us. The sun shines not on us, but in us. The rivers flow not passed, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. — John Muir (American naturalist and co-founder of the Sierra Club)
How deep our sleep last night in the mountains here, beneath the trees and stars, hushed by solemn-sounding waterfalls and many small soothing voices in sweet accord whispering peace!
And our first pure mountain day, warm, calm, cloudless, — how immeasurable it seems, how serenely wild! I can scarcely remember its beginning. Along the river, over the hills, in the ground, in the sky, spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm, new life, new beauty, unfolding, unrolling in glorious exuberant extravagance, — new birds in their nests, new winged creatures in the air, and new leaves, new flowers, spreading, shining, rejoicing everywhere. — John Muir (American naturalist and co-founder of the Sierra Club)
How hard to realize that every camp of men or beast has its glorious starry firmament for a roof. In such places, standing alone on the mountaintop, it is easy to realize that whatever special nests we make — leaves and moss like the marmots and the birds, or tents or piled stone — we all dwell in a house of one room — the world with the firmament for its roof — are all sailing the celestial spaces without leaving any track. — John Muir (American naturalist and co-founder of the Sierra Club)
When I discovered a new plant, I sat down beside it for a minute or a day, to make its acquaintance and hear what it had to tell… I asked the boulders I met, whence they came and whither they were going. — John Muir (American naturalist and co-founder of the Sierra Club)
The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, profits, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains — mountain-dwellers who have grown strong they are with the forest trees in Natures work-shops. — John Muir (American naturalist and co-founder of the Sierra Club)
If my soul could get away from this so-called prison, be granted all the list of attributes generally bestowed on spirits, my first ramble on spirit-wings would not be among the volcanoes of the moon. Nor should I follow the sunbeams to their sources in the sun. I should hover about the beauty of our own good star. I should not go moping around the tombs, nor around the artificial desolation of men. I should study Nature’s laws in all their crossings and unions: I should follow magnetic streams to their source and follow the shores of our magnetic oceans. I should go among the rays of the aurora, and follow them to their beginnings, and study their dealings and communions with other powers and expressions of matter. And I should go to the very center of our globe and read the whole splendid page from the beginning. – John Muir (American naturalist and co-founder of the Sierra Club)
I have a low opinion of books; they are but piles of stones set up to show travelers where other minds have been, or at best smoke signals to call attention… One day’s exposure to mountains is better than a cart load of books. — John Muir (American naturalist and co-founder of the Sierra Club)
There is growing awareness of the beauty of country … a sincere desire to keep some of it for all time. People are beginning to value highly the fact that a river runs unimpeded for a distance… They are beginning to obtain deep satisfaction from the fact that a herd of elk may be observed in back country, on ancestral ranges, where the Indians once hunted them. They are beginning to seek the healing relaxation that is possible in wild country. In short, they want it. — Olaus J. Murie (naturalist and co-founder of The Wilderness Society)
Wilderness itself is the basis of all our civilization. I wonder if we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness the right to live on? — Margaret (Mardy) Murie (Known as “Grandmother of the Conservation Movement,” wife of Olaus Murie)
Without knowing it, we utilize hundreds of products each day that owe their origin to wild animals and plants. Indeed our welfare is intimately tied up with the welfare of wildlife. Well may conservationists proclaim that by saving the lives of wild species, we may be saving our own. – Norman Myers (author of The Sinking Ark), 1983, from A Wealth of Wild Species
Returned me, oh sun, to my wild destiny, rain of the ancient wood, bringing me back to the aroma of swords that fall from the sky, the solitary peace of pasture and rock, the damp at the river-margins, the smell of the larch tree, the wind alive like a heart beating in the crowded restlessness of the towering araucaria.
Earth, give me back your pure gifts, the towers of silence which rose from the solemnity of their roots. I want to go back to being what I have not been, and learn to go back from such deeps that amongst all natural things I could live or not live; it does not matter to be one stone more, the dark stone, the pure stone which the river bears away. — Pablo Neruda (Chilean writer and communist politician)
The Wilderness holds answers to questions man has not yet learned how to ask. — Nancy Newhall (conservationist writer and photography critic)
All living creatures and all plants are a benefits to something. — Okute (Sioux Indian)
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting– over and over announcing your place in the family of things. – Mary Oliver (American poet), from poem Wild Geese
Appreciate it. Care for it. Never take it for granted. Allow yourself to hear the music, to feel the ancient rhythms.- Sigurd Olson
Respect the land. It has intrinsic value that our spirits need. Don’t be afraid to fight for it. It’s worth the struggle. - Sigurd Olson
There is something to being on your own, whether in a blind, trout fishing or canoeing. Alone you get close to nature, you can listen, think, feel yourself a part of the water, at one with the trees and grasses, a part of the whole eternal picture. I think this is what many men seek but never find, the sense of being an intimate part of anything they do. So much of a man’s time is spent being a good fellow, trying to be sociable, competing with others, that he does not find the real answer. - Sigurd Olson
I think that here is so much of what a man seeks, here so much the answer of what he needs to give himself contentment that he should try and find more frequently ways of satisfying his need. Once he senses that feeling of utter familiarity, of complete attunement, then he has gone a long way toward counteracting the bleakness of civilized living. We are not so far removed as yet, but what we must satisfy often the urge to be alone, to be a part of our surroundings, of being at one with the earth and sky and water. Here is real satisfaction, here fulfillment of the constant hunger of men for the past and primitive. - Sigurd Olson
The struggle for spirit has replaced the physical, and in his evolution psychologically man’s greatest minds have become aware of the emptiness of material striving. The struggle has become a positive drive toward perfection, all in keeping with his final hope: realization of the kingdom of God within him. – Sigurd Olsen
Urban man has thrown plans to the winds and is living a catch as catch can existence dominated by impermanence, speed, and fluidity of movement. He is divorcing himself from the earth, and in this divorcement he is losing contact with elemental and spiritual things, his sense of oneness with his environment, psychological and physiological needs for which he has been conditioned for a million years by an entirely different existence. - Sigurd Olson, “Our Need of Breathing Space,” at a Resources for the Future, Inc., forum, Washington, D.C., early 1958.
Important though such experience may be to physical welfare, its most valuable asset is without question in the realm of the spiritual….To countless thousands, wilderness has become a spiritual necessity. – Sigurd Olson, The Preservation of Wilderness, Living Wilderness, Autumn 1948
There have been countless campfires, each one different, but some so blended into their backgrounds that it is hard for them to emerge. But I have found that when I catch even a glimmer of their almost forgotten light in the eyes of some friend who has shared them with me, they begin to flame once more. Those old fires have strange and wonderful powers. Even their memories make life the adventure it was meant to be. – Sigurd Olson
Simplicity in all things is the secret of the wilderness and one of its most valuable lessons. It is what we leave behind that is important. I think the matter of simplicity goes further than just food, equipment, and unnecessary gadgets; it goes into the matter of thoughts and objectives as well. When in the wilds, we must not carry our problems with us or the joy is lost. — Sigurd F. Olson (naturalist author of The Singing Wilderness)
I am trying to save the knowledge that the forests and this planet are alive, to give it back to you who have lost the understanding. — Paulinho Paiakan (Kayapo Indian chief)
Must we always teach our children with books? Let them look at the mountains and the stars up above. Let them look at the beauty of the waters and the trees and flowers on earth. They will then begin to think, and to think is the beginning of a real education. – David Polis
The thoughts of the earth are my thoughts. The voice of the earth is my voice. All that belongs to the earth belongs to me. All that surrounds the earth surrounds me. It is lovely indeed, it is lovely indeed. — Proverbs, Sayings and Songs, Navajo Song
With the beauty before me,
May I walk With beauty behind me, May I walk With beauty above me, May I walk With beauty below me, May I walk With beauty all around me, May I walk Wandering on a trail of beauty, Lively, I walk. — Proverbs, Sayings and Songs, Navajo Indians
For there are some people who can live without wild things about them and the earth beneath their feet, and some who cannot. To those of us who, in a city, are always aware of the abused and abased earth below the pavement, walking on the grass, watching the flight of birds, or finding the first spring dandelion are the rights as old and unalienable as the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We belong to no cult. We are not Nature Lovers. We don’t love nature any more than we love breathing. Nature is simply something indispensable, like air and light and water, that we accept as necessary to living, and the nearer we can get to it the happier we are. — Louise Dickinson Rich (author of We Took to the Woods)
On the path that leads to Nowhere I have sometimes found my Soul. — Corinne Roosevelt Robinson (younger sister of President Theodore Roosevelt)
At first, the people talking about ecology were only defending the fishes, the animals, the forest, and the river. They didn’t realize that human beings were in the forest — and that these human beings were the real ecologist, because they couldn’t live without the forest and the forest couldn’t be saved without them. — Osmarino Amancio Rodrigues (Amazonian rubber tapper)
When late in life, one sits under a tree and contemplates the glory of a natural scene, there are fewer besetting apprehensions that one is wasting time; lack of time, then is grimly recognized as the greatest poverty; every moment gleaned for leisure is realized as a splendid, priceless investment. If only this could be perceived earlier, how much greater would be the value of life’s time. - Calvin Rutstrum, The Wilderness Life
The whole secret of the study of nature lies in learning how to use one’s eyes. – George Sand
To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground. — Chief Seattle, 1855, upon surrendering his land to Governor Isaac Stevens
There is no quiet place in white man’s cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in the Spring or the rustle of an insect’s wings. — Chief Seattle
You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our childresn–that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.
This we know. The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself… — Chief Seattle
The more civilized man becomes, the more he needs and craves a great background of forest wildness, to which he may return like a contrite prodigal from the husks of an artificial life. — Ellen Burns Sherman
The care of rivers is not a question of rivers, but of the human heart. — Tanaka Shozo (Japanese environmental activist)
Beauty created by Nature is equal in value to, and to be accorded reverence equal to that of the beauty of music, art or poetry of man, and experts are available to testify as to degrees of natural beauty just as they are able to testify to the quality of mortals’ art. – David Sive
Nature is not a place to visit, it is home. — Gary Snyder (American poet and essayist), from Practice of the Wild
In the blue night frost haze, the sky glows with the moon pine tree tops bend snow-blue, fade into sky, frost, starlight, the creak of boots, rabbit tracks, deer tracks, what do we know. — Gary Snyder (American poet and essayist), from Pine Tree Tops
The old Lakota was wise, He knew that man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. — Luther Standing Bear (Native American author)
The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred Earth. Their tipis were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The birds that flew into the air came to rest upon the earth and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing. – Luther Standing Bear (Native American author), from Land of the Spotted Eagle
We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth, as “wild.” Only to the white man was nature a “wilderness” and only to him was the land “infested” with “wild” animals and “savage” people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it “wild” for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the “Wild West” began. — Luther Standing Bear (Native American author)
We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope. — Wallace Stegner (American writer, historian, and environmentalist), 1960, from a letter written to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission
We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, we’ll go to great effort to save what it might destroy. — Wallace Stegner (American writer, historian, and environmentalist)
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, shattering to foam again…
It was a prayer and comforting to wake in late and hear the undiminished shouting of the water in the night. And at sunup it was still there, powerful and incessant, with the slant sun tangled in its rainbow spray, the grass blue with the wetness, and the air heady as ether and scented with campfire smolder.
By such a river it is impossible to believe that one will ever be tired or old. Every sense applauds it. Taste it, feel its chill on the teeth: it is purity absolute. Watch its racing current, its steady renewal of force: it is transient and eternal. And listen again to its sounds: get far enough away so that the noise of falling tons of water does not stun the ears, and hear how much is going on underneath — a whole symphony of smaller sounds, hiss and splash and gurgle, the small talk of side channels, the whisper of blown and scattered spray gathering itself and beginning to flow again, secret and irresistible, among the wet rocks. – Wallace Stegner (American writer, historian, and environmentalist)
There’s no music like a little river’s … It takes the mind out of doors … and… sir, it quiets a man down like saying his prayers. – Robert Louis Stevenson (Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer), from Prince Otto
Once in a while you find a place on earth that becomes your very own. A place undefined. Waiting for you to bring your color, your self. A place untouched, unspoiled, undeveloped. Raw, honest, and haunting. No one, nothing is telling you how to feel or who to be. Let the mountains have you for a day… — Sundance
We no longer see the world as a single entity. We’ve moved to cities and we think the economy is what gives us our life, that if the economy is strong we can afford garbage collection and sewage disposal and fresh food and water and electricity. We go through life thinking that money is the key to having whatever we want, without regard to what it does to the rest of the world. – David Suzuki
We are upsetting the atmosphere upon which all life depends. In the late 80s when I began to take climate change seriously, we referred to global warming as a “slowmotion catastrophe” one we expected to kick in perhaps generations later. Instead, the signs of change have accelerated alarmingly. – David Suzuki
As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned watchers of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us: “With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas,” or, “They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them.” — U Thant (Burmese diplomat and the 3rd Secretary-General of the United Nations)
All good things are wild, and free - Henry David Thoreau
However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do want society. - Henry David Thoreau
I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life; living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness out of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience. – Henry David Thoreau
Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves – Henry David Thoreau
If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. — Henry David Thoreau
We need the tonic of wildness, to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. – Henry David Thoreau
When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and the most interminable, and to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter the swamp as a sacred place–a sanctum sanctorum.there is the strength, the marrow of Nature.— Henry David Thoreau (American writer and naturalist)
And this, our life exempt from public haunts, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. — J.R.R. Tolkien (English writer)
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin. — J.R.R. Tolkien (English writer)
We are literally children of the earth, and removed from her our spirits wither or run to various forms of insanity. Unless we can refresh ourselves at least by intermittent contact with nature, we grow awry. – G. M. Trevelyan
It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs, looking up at stars, and we didn’t even feel like talking aloud. — Mark Twain (American writer), 1884, from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man. — Stuart Udall (Arizona cabinet member)
Those who wander may not be lost. - Unknown
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. — Unknown, Haida Indian Saying
Trees give peace to the souls of men. — Nora Waln (American writer)
After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on — have found that none of these satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains. — Walt Whitman (American poet and essayist), 1892, From Specimen Days
Now I see the secret of making the best persons. It is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth. — Walt Whitman (American poet and essayist), from Leaves of Grass
A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. — Wilderness Act of 1964
If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go. We are talking about the body of the beloved, not real estate. — Terry Tempest Williams (American nature writer)
Come forth into the light of things. Let Nature be your teacher. — William Wordsworth (English romantic poet)
For I have learned To look on the nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense of sublime Of something far more deeply infused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the minds of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All living things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods And mountains, and of all that we behold From this green earth, of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear — both what they half create, And what they perceive, will be pleased to recognize In nature and the Language of the sense The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart and soul Of all my moral being. — William Wordsworth (English romantic poet)
I believe that at least in the present phase of our civilization we have a profound, a fundamental need for areas of wilderness – a need that is not only recreational and spiritual but also educational and scientific, and withal essential to a true understanding of ourselves, our culture, own own natures, and our place in all nature.
This need is for areas of the earth within which we stand without our mechanisms that make us immediate masters over our environment – areas of wild nature in which we sense ourselves to be, what in fact I believe we are, dependent members of an interdependent community of living creatures that together derive their existence from the Sun.
By very definition this wilderness is a need. The idea of wilderness as an area without man’s influence is man’s own concept. Its values are human values. Its preservation is a purpose that arises out of man’s own sense of his fundamental needs. – Howard Zahniser (author of the Wilderness Act), from The Need for Wilderness Areas
It is not long since man thought of himself as the center of the universe, thought even of the Sun – the very source of all our life – as a light by day revolving about the Earth. As our new understanding has come – through science – science also has brought us many other new and wonderful discoveries, and the new knowledge of what we are has been overlooked by many of us in our eagerness for the new knowledge of what we can do. We have become as proud over what we can do as ever our ancestors could have been over themselves as the center of the universe.
We deeply need the humility to know ourselves as the dependent members of a great community of life, and this can indeed be one of the spiritual benefits of a wilderness experience. Without the gagets, the inventions, the contrivances whereby men have seemed to establish among themselves an independence of nature, without these distractions, to know the wilderness is to know a profound humility, to recognize one’s littleness, to sense dependence and interdependence, indebtedness, and responsibility.
Perhaps, indeed, this is the distinctive ministration of wilderness to modern man, the characteristic effect of an area which we most deeply need to provide for in our preservation programs. — Howard Zahniser (author of the Wilderness Act), from The Need for Wilderness Areas
We are part of the wilderness of the universe. Some of us think we see this so clearly that for ourselves, for our childres, our continuing posterity, and our fellow men we covet with a consuming intensity the fullness of human development that keeps its contact with wildness. – Howard Zahniser (author of the Wilderness Act), from How Much Can We Afford to Lose?, in Wildlands in Our Civilization (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1964): 51. This address was also printed in the Sierra Club Bulletin (April 1951)
I believe we have a profound fundamental need for areas of the earth where we stand without our mechanisms that make us immediate masters over our environment. — Howard Zahniser (author of the Wilderness Act)
He who has known how to love the land has loved eternity. — Stefan Zeromski (Polish novelist)
Of course this is but a sampling of what has been written on man’s role in nature….but among the ones I find most thought provoking from this list are the following:
Nature includes all of the universe and man is not only a part of nature, he is in it up to his neck. – N.J. Berrill (science writer)
Remember, you belong to Nature, not it to you. – Archibald Belaney, aka Grey Owl
You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our childresn–that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.
This we know. The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself… — Chief Seattle
And some not mentioned in the above list, from more of a paddling perspective….but just as important to ponder on:
You have to do what you can, do your best with what you are. And you have to believe in wilderness. If you do that you can’t go wrong. – Kirk Albert Walter Wipper b Grahamdale, Manitoba, December 6th, 1923 d Peterborough, Ontario, March 18, 2011
Wilderness: a beautiful word to describe a beautiful land. Wilderness though is a white man’s concept. To the Native people, the land was not wild. It was home. It provided shelter, clothed and fed them. And echoing through their souls was a song of the land. The singing isn’t as loud as it used to be. But you can still hear it in the wind….in the silence of the misty morning….in the drip of the water from the tip of a paddle. The song is still here if you know how to listen. – Bill Mason, Song Of the Paddle
On wilderness: I like being out here. I like looking around. Listening. Seeing how the wilderness fits together. It’s like a puzzle. When we go in and change things, it upsets the balance. And what a great puzzle our world is. It’s beautiful, powerful, and mysterious. – Becky Mason
If it is calm, the canoes drifting through reflections with nothing to break the vast silence but the hypnotic swish of paddles, there are moments when one seems suspended between heaven and earth. If it is stormy and the lakes alive, with whitecaps and blowing spume, each instant is full of battle and excitement. When, after hours and sometimes days, the misty outlines of the lake take form again, islands slowly emerge and float upon the surface, headlands become real, one passes through a door into the beyond itself and the mystery is no more.
Life is a series of open horizons, with one no sooner completed than another looms ahead. Some are traversed swiftly, while others extend so far into the future one cannot predict their end. Penetrations into the unknown, all give meaning to what has gone before, and courage for what is to come. More than physical features, they are horizons of mind and spirit, and when one looks backward, we find they have blended into the whole panorama of our lives. - Sigurd Olson, from Open Horizons, 1969.
The sun was trembling now on the edge of the ridge. It was alive, almost fluid and pulsating, and as I watched it sink I thought that I could feel the earth turning from it, actually feel its rotation. Over all was the silence of the wilderness, that sense of oneness which comes only when there are no distracting sights or sounds, when we listen with inward ears and see with inward eyes, when we feel and are aware with our entire beings rather than our senses. I thought as I sat there of the ancient admonition “Be still and know that I am God,” and knew that without stillness there can be no knowing, without divorcement from outside influences man cannot know what spirit means. - Sigurd Olson, The Singing Wilderness
As a society and a individual you become very stale. No challenge. Out here, I know exactly what I’m about. You can’t fake your character out here. Wilderness actually will bite you back. You are who you are. It’s good for the body and good for the soul. I want to be that 80-year old guy sitting on the porch and saying “I remember when…” as opposed to saying “I wish I did…” – Kevin Callan from “This Is Canoeing” video.
Just some thoughts for a Wednesday….about our place in the bigger scheme of things….as part of Mother Earth….and all of her wonderful natural world….
Paddles up until later then…..
