C. "Griff" Griffin

             Quotes

Note on quotes......I didn't identify or authenticate their source.  They come from very newsletters and books.

"When all the dangerous cliffs are fenced off, all the trees that might fall on people are cut down, all of the insects that bit are positioned...and 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 (Canadian naturalist)

"Eco-tourism is the 'buzzword of the year,' according to the New York Times.

If I mistake now, it will be a great resort for tourists and madmen who like climbing mountains at the risk of breaking their  necks."  Collingwood Schreiber, Canadian Pacific Railway chief engineer, 1884

"To us the enjoyment of solitude, complete independence, and the beauty of undefiled panoramas is absolutely essential to happiness." Bob Marshall

The public lands have always been the arena where Americans fought for their dreams. The dream of wealth, the dream of home, the dreams of peace and escape chase each other across the history of these lands like streaks of light across the Western sky.  There are now, as they have always been, inseparable from our national destiny.  What we do with them tells a great deal about what we are, what we care about and what will become of us........After a century and a half of carelessness and conflict, the land still retains its capacity to inspire and to console.  It is a kind of drawing account for the spirit.  Donald Jackson, Life, 1/8/71 

"We [Eskimos and Indians] have invented nor needed to conceive of the idea of parks and preserves.  It is this conceptual problem that is the source of misunderstanding which makes our approach to nature so essentially different.  Now that Americans have recognize a measure of importance to wilderness, they are panic-struck about this and have delivered this panic to our doorsteps.  Now we are forced to help them quell than panic and bring relief.  It is certainly within our altruistic nature to help, but I wonder if their relief requires our death."  Theresa J. Pederson, 1977

"Wilderness has been characterized as barren and unproductive; little can be grown in its sand and rock. But the crops of wilderness have always been its spiritual values -- silence and solitude, a sense of awe and gratitude -- able to be harvested by any traveler who visits."
- David Douglas from Wilderness Sojourn

"Indians and animals know better how to live than white man; nobody can be in good health if he does not have all the time fresh air, sunshine, and good water.

Flying Hawk, Oglala Sioux Chief c 1930

"In the United States, there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.  That is what makes America what it is."  Gertrude Stein 1936

"While we can rely on technology to compensate for depletion of certain kinds of natural resources, we cannot rely on technological progress to increase the supply of natural environments which yield utility through direct personal contact. "  John V. Kurtilia

"Over the long haul of life on this planet, it is the ecologists, and not the bookkeepers of business, who are the ultimate accountants."  Stewart Udall, 1970

"Indians and animals know better how to live than white man; nobody can be in good health if he does not have all the time fresh air, sunshine, and good water."  Flying Hawk, Oglala Sioux chief (1930)

"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?"
                    --Mardy Murie

"I hope 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 "Mardy" Murie, 1902-2003

"There is no aristocracy in trees.  They are not haughty.  They will thrive near the humblest cabin just as well as they will in the shadow of a king's palace.  There is a true triumph in the unswerving integrity and genuine democracy of trees."  J. Sterling Morton, Founder, Arbor Day

"In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks."  John Muir

"It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it." - Edward Abbey

"What does the open space of democracy look like? In the open space of democracy, there is room for dissent.  In the open space of democracy there is room for difference.  In the open space of democracy the health of the environment is seen as the wealth of our communities."  Terry Tempest Williams

"We have invented exercise, recreation, pleasure, amusement, and the rest. But recreation, pleasure, amusement, fun and all the rest are poor substitutes for joy; and joy, I am convinced, has its roots in something from which civilization tends to cut us off.  Some awareness of the world outside of man must exist if one is to experience the happiness and solace which some of us find in an awareness of nature and in our love for her
manifestations."
Joseph Wood Krutch, (1893-1970) American amateur naturalist,
conservationist, and writer.

"If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by nature, they are called developers." Joseph Wood Krutch, (1893-1970)

"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, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy."  Wallace Stegner

• "If you wish your children to think deep thoughts, to know the holiest emotions, take them to the woods and hills, and give them the freedom of the meadows; the hills purify those who walk upon them."  Richard Jefferies.

• "In wildness is preservation of the world."  H.D. Thoreau

• "To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together." - Barry Lopez

• "To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them."

  Theodore Roosevelt's message to Congress, December 3rd, 1907

  "The next war in our region will be over the waters of the Nile, not politics."  Esmat Abdel Mequid, Egyptian Foreign Minister, 1990.

• "[Man] cannot control or change the ocean as, in his brief tenancy of earth, he has subdued and plundered the continents."  Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us, 1951

• "If I wished to see a mountain or other scenery under the most favorable auspices, I would go to it in foul weather, so as to be there when it cleared up; we are then in the most suitable mood, and Nature is most fresh and inspiring.  There is no serenity so fair as that which is just established in a tearful eye."  Henry David Thoreau

• "We do need a 'new economy,' but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste.  An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product.  We need a peaceable economy."  Wendell Berry, Thoughts in the Presence of Fear.

• "One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin."  William Shakespeare

• "Nine planets round the sun, only one does the sun embrace.  Upon this watered one, so much we take for granted; So let us sleep outside tonight, lay down in our mother's arms, for here we can rest safely  … One sweet world around a star is spinning - One sweet world - And in her breath I'm swimming, and here we will rest in peace."
  - Dave Matthews
  

• "The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time."  Henry David Thoreau

• "It was a spring without voices.  On the mornings that had one throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.”  Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

• "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow
  into you as sunshine flows into trees."
  John Muir

• " It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits."  Aristotle

• One more tidbit: Oregon firefighter Ed Hall was one of four picked to greet President Bush on a recent visit to Portland. He knew he would have only a few seconds to say something, so he thought carefully about what it would be. He said, "Mr. President, we don't need to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge." Yes! Thank you, Ed Hall.

• "Nothing great has been and nothing great can be accomplished without passion."  Hegel

• "First I thought I was fighting for the rubber tappers, then I thought I was fighting for the Amazon, then I realized I was fighting for humanity."  Chico Mendes 1988.

• “In a democratic society, the public’s right of access to the debate in the sense of being informed about it and participating in it is as great as the public demands it to be.” Alvin Weinberg, Science and Trans-Science 

• "I am in love with this green earth." Charles Lamb

• "The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago . . . had they happened to be within reach of predatory human hands."     Havelock Ellis
• "Nature is beautiful, always beautiful!   Every little flake of snow is a perfect cystal, and they fall together as gracefully as if fairies of the air caught waterdrops and made them into artificial flowers to garland the winds of the wind!"  Lydia Maria Child

  Any relation to the land - the habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even hunting on it - generates the feeling of patriotism."  Ralph Waldo Emerson

   

  Environmentalism is no longer about wilderness protection; it's about saving the collective neck of humanity."   Michael Oppenheimer, NY Times Book Review, Nov. 25, 1990.

   

  "It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits." Aristotle

  "The rich diversity of the world's cultures reflects a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth." - Aldo Leopold

• "I must confess to a feeling of profound humility in the presence of a universe which transcends us at almost every point.  I feel like a child who while playing by the seashores has found a few bright colored shells and few pebbles while the whole vast ocean of truth stretches out almost untouched and unruffled before my eager fingers."  Isaac Newton

• "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."   John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911.

• "It may not be crowing per se that degrades us, but a lack of relief from crowding - a lack of open space, a lack of green, of nature going its own way."  Charles E. Little and John G. Mitchell, Space for Survival, 1971.

• "Praise be, my Lord, for our sister, Mother Earth, Who sustains and governs us.   And brings forth diverse fruits with many-hued flowers and grasses.  Saint Francis of Assissi, patron saint of ecology (1181-1126)  Canticle of the Sun

• "I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security.  Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad.  Otherwise what is there to defend?  Robert Redford, Yosemite National Park dedication, 1985

• "I submit that a nation which cannot afford to protect its endangered species has already overreached itself biologically. " Thomas E Lovejoy, 10 April 1978.

• "All our leaders now call themselves environmentalists.  But their brand of environmentalism poses very few challenges to the present system.  Instead they propose to spruce up the planet wit a few technical fixes or individual lifestyle changes:  scrubbers on coal plants, eating 'all-natural' cereals, and so on."    Ivan Illich  New Perspectives Quarterly, Spring 1989

• "I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use our natural resources, but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.   Theodore Roosevelt, speech in Washington, D.C. 1900

• "There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation.  Herman E. Daly.   Science, 17 June 1988

• "We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things by mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.  We can never have enough of nature."    Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

• "No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.  The proof that conservation has not yet touched these foundations of conduct lies in the fact that philosophy and religion have not yet heard of it.  In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial."   Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949

• Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.  Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.  the winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while care will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.    John Muir

• "Nature is the armory of genius.   Cities serve it poorly, books and colleges at second hand; the eye craves the spectacle of the horizon; of mountain, ocean, river and plain, the clouds and stars; actual contact with the laments, sympathy with the seasons as they rise and roll."   Amos Bronson Alcott

• A famous line that you may have heard of:  "I went to the woods because I wished to liver 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."  Henry David Thoreau

"I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security.  Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad.  otherwise what is there to defend?

Robert Redford, Yosemite National Park dedication, 1985

One does not become an environmentalist until one achieves some kind of privilege and feels one has something worth protecting.  Environmentalists are a privileged minority.

William Tucker, Washington Times, April 20, 1990

Environment is one-tenth science and nine-tenths politics.

Anonymous British Delegate, U.N. Conference on Human Environment, Stockholm, June 1972

"We need the tonic of wilderness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable..  We can never have enough of nature.  Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854.

The supreme reality of our time is....the vulnerability of our planet.

John F. Kennedy, speech June 28, 1963.

The further you go from a mature society back toward the frontier, the less acceptable is the ecologic viewpoint of how to plan resource use."

Starker Leopold in Frank F. Darling and John P. Milton, eds. Future Environments of North America, 1966.

"Multiple-purpose development is no longer good enough.  All-purpose conservation must be our standard."

Hubert H. Humphrey, speech, The Dalles, Oregon, Sept. 28, 1968.

"Our government...is like a rich and foolish spendthrift who has inherited a magnificent estate in perfect order, and then has left his fields an meadows, forests and parks, to be sold and plundered and wasted."

John Muir (1838-1914)  Atlantic Monthly August 1897

"Ultimately, we are the endangered species... Homo sapiens are perceived to stand at the top of the pyramid of life, but the pinnacle is a precarious station. We need a large measure of self-consciousness to constantly remind us of the commanding role we enjoy only at the favor of the web of life that sustains us..."
Sen. Leahy in The Sinking Ark 1979

Source:  Most quotes are from  Rodes, B.K and R. Odell.  1992.  A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations.

The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.