Quotes about Conservation

The preserver of abundance is excellence.

the American Indian, who was ignorant by the same standards, nevertheless knew how to live in the country without making violence the invariable mode of his relation to it; in fact, from the ecologist's or the conservationist's point of view, he did it no violence. This is because he had, in place of what we would call education, a fully integrated culture, the content of which was a highly complex sense of his dependence on the earth.

As Sir Albert Howard, a British agrarian much admired by Berry, once put it in The Soil and Health: "The using up of fertility is a transfer of past capital and of future possibilities to enrich a dishonest present: it is banditry pure and simple.

If we can't afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we're in an insurmountable mess.

The earth which sustains humanity must not be injured. It must not be destroyed!

A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it.

I've learned that if you want people to join in any kind of conservation effort, you have to help them to care with their hearts, not just their heads.

Ecology is a dirty seven-letter word to many people. They are like heavy sleepers refusing to be aroused. "Leave me alone! It's not time to get up yet!"

You can't save the whales by eating whales, but paradoxically, you can help save rare, domesticated foods by eating them. They're kept alive by gardeners who have a taste for them, and farmers who know they'll be able to sell them. The consumer becomes a link in this conservation chain by seeking out the places where heirloom vegetables are sold, taking them home, whacking them up with knives, and learning to incorporate their exceptional tastes into personal and family expectations.

We have become a throwaway society. Instead of honoring and preserving our past, we tear it down, shove it aside, and just go on our merry way. Well, I won't have it. We have to stand firm for what we believe in. Only in the most dire circumstances should a structure of historical significance be demolished.

Every time I have some moment on a seashore, or in the mountains, or sometimes in a quiet forest, I think this is why the environment has to be preserved.

Edgar Wayburn has worked to preserve the most breath-taking examples of the American landscape. In fact, over the course of more than a half-century, both as President of the Sierra Club and as a private citizen, he has saved more of our wilderness than any person alive.