1.
“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization…”
— Henry David Thoreau, "Walking"
2.
“Plants are nature’s alchemists, expert at transforming water, soil, and sunlight into an array of precious substances, many of them beyond the ability of human beings to conceive, much less manufacture. While we were nailing down consciousness and learning to walk on two feet, they were, by the same process of natural selection, inventing photosynthesis (the astonishing trick of converting sunlight into food) and perfecting organic chemistry.”
— Michael Pollan, "The Botany of Desire"
3.
“When times go bad
When times go rough
Won't you lay me down in tall grass
And let me do my stuff.”
— Fleetwood Mac, "Second Hand News"
4.
“Biodiversity is the totality of all inherited variation in the life forms of Earth, of which we are one species. We study and save it to our great benefit. We ignore and degrade it to our great peril.”
— E.O. Wilson
5.
“Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature"
6.
“Hey farmer, farmer
Put away that DDT now
Give me spots on my apples
But LEAVE me the birds and the bees
Please!
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
‘Til its gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot”
— Joni Mitchell, "Big Yellow Taxi"
7.
“But 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. So he kept his youth close to its softening influence.”
— Luther Standing Bear, "Nature"
8.
“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forest to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment.”
— Wallace Stegner, "Coda: Wilderness Letter"
9.
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
— Margaret Atwood, "Bluebeard's Egg"
10.
"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 alike."
— John Muir, "The Yosemite"
11.
“Nobody knows where I am. I don’t know what is happening to anybody else in the world. While I am here I will not speak, and will have no reason or need for speech. It is only beyond this lonesomeness for the places I have come from that I can reach the vital reality of a place such as this.”
— Wendell Berry, "An Entrance to the Woods"
12.
“Well you roll on roads over fresh green grass.
For your lorryloads pumping petrol gas.
And you make them long, and you make them tough.
But they just go on and on, and it seems you can't get off.
Oh, I know we've come a long way,
We're changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?”
— Cat Stevens, "Where Do The Children Play"
13.
“If enough people had spoken for the river, we might have saved it. if enough people had believed that our scarred country was worth defending, we might have dug in our heels and fought. Our attachments to the land were all private. We had no shared lore, no literature, no art to root us there, to give us courage, to help us stand our ground.”
— Scott Russell Sanders, "Buckeye"
14.
“I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want.”
— Andy Warhol
15.
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.”
— Rachel Carson, "The Sense of Wonder"
