Wilderness Quotes

How often we speak of the great silences of the wilderness and of the importance of preserving them and the wonder and peace to be found there. When I think of them, I see the lakes and rivers of the North, the muskegs and expenses of tundra, the barren lands beyond all roads. I see the mountain ranges of the West and the high, rolling ridges of the Appalacians. I picture the deserts of the Southwest and their brilliant panoramas of color, the impenetrable swamp lands of the South. They will always be there and their beauty may not change, but should their silences be broken, they will never be the same.

Sigurd F. Olson

The Wilderness holds answers to questions man has not yet learned how to ask.

Nancy Newhall

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

A third peculiarity about the forest is that it exhibits a dynamic beauty. A Beethoven symphony or a poem of Shelley, a landscape by Corot or a Gothic cathedral, once it is finished becomes virtually static. But the wilderness is in constant flux. A seed germinates, and a stunted seedling battles for decades against the dense shade of the virgin forest. Then some ancient tree blows down and the long-suppressed plant suddenly enters into the full vigor of delayed youth, grows rapidly from sapling to maturity, declines into the conky senility of many centuries, dropping millions of seeds to start a new forest upon the rotting debris of its own ancestors, and eventually topples over to admit the sunlight which ripens another woodland generation.

Bob Marshall

Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important.

Aldo Leopold†

Wilderness is a continuous stretch of county preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeksí pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.

Aldo Leopold†

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

Aldo Leopold

Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.

Aldo Leopold

The wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit.

Joseph Wood Krutch

Without enough wilderness America will change. Democracy, with its myriad personalities and increasing sophistication, must be fibred and vitalized by the regular contact with outdoor growths -- animals, trees, sun warmth, and free skies -- or it will dwindle and pale.

Ralph Waldo Emerson†

When all the dangerous cliffs are fenced off, all the trees that might fall on people are cut down,all of the insects that bite are poisoned... and all of the grizzlies are dead because they are occasionally dangerous, the wilderness will not be made safe. Rather, the safety will have destroyed the wilderness.

R. Yorke Edwards

The wooing of the Earth thus implies much more than converting the wilderness into humanized environments. It means also preserving natural environments in which to experience mysteries transcending daily life and from which to recapture, in a Proustian kind of remembrance, the awareness of the cosmic forces that have shaped humankind.

Rene Dubos†

The wilderness is a place of rest -- not in the sense of being motionless, for the lure, after all, is to move, to round the next bend. The rest comes in the isolation from distractions, in the slowing of the daily centrifugal forces that keep us off balance.

David Douglas

The Arctic has a call that is compelling. The distant mountains [of the Brooks Range in Alaska] make one want to go on and on over the next ridge and over the one beyond. The call is that of a wilderness known only to a few...This last American wilderness must remain sacrosanct.

William O. Douglas

To me, a wilderness is where the flow of wildness is essentially uninterrupted by technology; without wilderness the world is a cage

David Brower