The Amazon Outdoor Store
We are cutting out our kidneys to enlarge our stomachs."
—Eric Freyfogle, Illinois law professor,
on the destruction of wetlands
Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm.
—Aldo Leopold
The national park is the best idea America ever had. —James Bryce, British Ambassador
to the U.S., 1912
Today’s problems cannot be solved if we still think the way we thought when we created them. —Albert Einstein
The only thing that ever sat its way to success was a hen. —Sarah Brown
Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet. —Roger Miller
The silken rush of woodland waters and the scoured shapes of the desert—these and countless other treasures we owe to those farsighted enough to have preserved the public lands that make up our inheritance. —T.H. Watkins
In the long term, the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it’s unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is the rule of nature.
—Mollie Beattie
If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.
—President Lyndon B. Johnson,
Wilderness Act of 1964
I hope that the United States of America is not so rich that she can afford to let these wildernesses pass by. Or so poor that she cannot afford to keep them. —Margaret Murie
The wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit.
—Joseph Wood Krutch
Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.
—Sir John Lubbock
There is just one hope for repulsing the tyrannical ambition of civilization to conquer every niche of the whole earth. That hope is the organization of spirited people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness.
—Robert Marshall
The wilderness holds answers to questions man has not yet learned to ask. —Nancy Newhall
I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
—Henry David Thoreau
Do not be afraid to go out on a limb ... That’s where the fruit is. —Anonymous
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today. —James Dean
In terms of wilderness preservation, Alaska is the last frontier. This time, given one great final chance, let us strive to do it right. Not in our generation, nor ever again, will we have a land and wildlife opportunity approaching the scope and importance of this one. —Morris Udall
The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
—Rachel Carson
It’s hard for the modern generation to understand Thoreau, who lived beside a pond but didn’t own water-skis or a snorkel.
—Bill Vaughan
The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks. —Tennessee Williams
So bleak is the picture... that the bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century.
—Philip Shabecoff
God bless America. Let’s save some of it.
—Edward Abbey
To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival. —Wendell Berry
In the end, we conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught.
—Baba Dioum, Senegalese poet
