Okay I thought this thread deserved some more serious input so here's a few good quotes:
A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
- Greek Proverb
The frog does not drink up the pond in which it lives.
- Chinese Proverb
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
- Rachel Carson
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
Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.
- Edward Abbey
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
- Edward Abbey
All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.
- Aldo Leopold
I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving.
- Edward Abbey
The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.
- Edward Abbey
The greatest wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artefact called civilization.
- Aldo Leopold
The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only those who know the most about it can appreciate how little we know about it. The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
- Aldo Leopold
In God's wildness lies the hope of the world - the great fresh, unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.
- John Muir
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
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 cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
- John Muir
We need wilderness because we are wild animals. Every man needs a place where he can go to go crazy in peace. Every Boy Scout troop deserves a forest to get lost, miserable, and starving in. Even the maddest murderer of the sweetest wife should get a chance for a run to the sanctuary of the hills. If only for the sport of it. For the terror, freedom, and delirium...
- Edward Abbey
In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia.
- Charles A Lindbergh
The wild things of this earth are not ours to do with as we please. They have been given to us in trust, and we must account for them to the generations which will come after us and audit our accounts.
- William T. Hornaday
The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom.
- Gary Snyder
Nature is not a place to visit, it is home.
- Gary Snyder
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
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
- Henry David Thoreau
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
The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.
- Wendell Berry
The wilderness holds answers to more questions than we yet know how to ask.
- Nancy Newhall
We abuse the land because we regard it as a community belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
- Aldo Leopold
I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.
- Henry David Thoreau
Not all those who wander are lost!
- JRR Tolkien
To the dull mind nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
Now I see the secret of making the best person, it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
-Walt Whitman
And a final quote from the recently deceased Edmund Hillary
We climb not to conquer the mountain but ourselves.
- Sir Edmund Hillary
