Wilderness Quotes - Page 31

• Even as my family fell apart and things were at their most hopeless, my dad and I found a lot of happiness in the wilderness - sleeping on the cold gravel and killing as many things as we could get our hands on. Even as my mom got progressively more crazy, we found a happiness, in flashes.

  Leigh Newman

  Mom, Dad, Crazy

  Source: therumpus.net

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• We have a very old conservation movement, particularly in the United States, which has focused on campaigns to protect endangered species: the spotted owl, the old-growth forest. But usually it stops there. To me, biodiversity is the full spectrum. Species conservation is not only about wilderness conservation. It’s also about protecting the livelihood of people even while changing the dominant relationship that humans have had with other species. In India, it’s an economic issue, not just an ecological one.

  Vandana Shiva

  Issues, People, Owl

  Interview with David Barsamian, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. September 29, 2011.

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• Moses led his people through the wilderness and he wasn't permitted to enter the Promised Land. Jesus was crucified. Mohammad founded a state which soon became an empire, so that Islam from the very beginning is involved with government, with politics. And therefore there is a very clear strong political tradition in Islam.

  Bernard Lewis

  Jesus, Strong, People

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• It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation. Yes we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights. Yes we can. It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness. Yes we can.

  Barack Obama

  Night, Destiny, Yes We Can

  Barack Obama, (2008). “Change We Can Believe In”, p.222, Canongate Books

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• It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered, before the adverse hosts could meet. A wide, and, apparently, an impervious boundary of forests, severed the possessions of the hostile provinces of France and England. The hardy colonist, and the trained European who fought at his side, frequently expended months in struggling against the rapids of the streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the mountains, in quest of an opportunity to exhibit their courage in a more martial conflict.

  James F. Cooper

  War, Struggle, Book

  "The Last of the Mohicans". Book by James F. Cooper, 1826.

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• The Anglo-Saxon farmers had scarce conquered foothold, stronghold, freehold in the Western wilderness before they became sowers of hemp--with remembrance of Virginia, with remembrance of dear ancestral Britain.

  James Lane Allen

  Book, Virginia, Remembrance

  James Lane Allen (2016). “The reign of law. A tale of the Kentucky hemp fields.”, p.2, Aegitas

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• It's not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild nature fades.

  Clarissa Pinkola Estes

  Understanding, Disappear, Planets

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• The same people in the Congress who are busy kicking holes in the social safety net are also those who would sell off the nation's forests for a song, give away its national parks, and trash its wilderness preserves; there is a connection between the two impulses.

  Paul Gruchow

  Song, Two, People

  Paul Gruchow (1997). “Boundary Waters: The Grace of the Wild”

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• Sometimes no matter how well you prepare, no matter how conservative your decision making, no matter how few Y chromosomes are along on your trip, you can still find yourself in a mud slide or a hurricane without a dry piece of clothing to your name. But those of us who have given our time and usually our hearts to outdoorsmen over the years know that, for many of them, it's not really a wilderness trip unless, MacGyver-like, they have to make a fire out of a pair of shorts, a glow stick, and a ketchup bottle; it's not really an adventure until someone gets airlifted out.

  Pam Houston

  Adventure, Heart, Years

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• The occupation of America (and Columbus's arrival quite clearly was an occupation, no one can deny that) meant that the entire history of the Native Americans was rendered invisible. The land could only be occupied if it was first defined as empty. So it was defined as a wilderness, even though it had been used by native people for millennia.

  Vandana Shiva

  Native American, Land, People

  Source: scottlondon.com

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• it will be objected that a constantly increasing population makes resistance and conservation a hopeless battle. this is true. unless a way is found to stabilize the nation's population, the parks can not be saved. or anything else worth a damn. wilderness preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will be forgotten under the overwhelming pressure of a struggle for mere survival and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely industrialized, ever more crowded environment. for my own part i would rather take my chances in a thermonuclear war than live in such a world.

  Edward Abbey

  War, Struggle, Survival

  Edward Abbey (1968). “Desert Solitaire”, p.52, Simon and Schuster

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• Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.

  Karl Polanyi

  Men, Self, Ideas

  Karl Polanyi (1957). “The Great Transformation”, Beacon Pr

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• The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. It took me four years, seven months, and three days to do it. I didn't know where I was going until I got there.It was a place called the Bridge of the Gods.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Years, Seven Months, Bridges

  Cheryl Strayed (2012). “Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found”, p.30, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.

  Paul Theroux

  Heart, Cities, Pessimistic

  "Author Paul Theroux on His Final African Journey". Interview with Veronica Gould Stoddart, www.usatoday.com. May 23, 2013.

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• The point of the dragonfly's terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows,is not that it all fits together like clockwork--for it doesn'tbut that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, finged tangle. Freedom is the world's water and weather, the world's nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.

  Annie Dillard

  Beautiful, Nature, Freedom

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• A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below,--such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Poetry, Age, Honey

  Henry David Thoreau (1993). “Civil Disobedience, and Other Essays”, p.63, Courier Corporation

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• In the one instance, the dreamerloses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestionsuntilhe finds the incitamentum, or first cause of his musings,... forgotten. In my case, the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Sight, Imagination, Vision

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• When I was in high school... I loved the outdoors, and I was introduced to wilderness camping. I was in a little prep school - a boarding school in southern California, in Ojai - and when I was in this school, they had a camping program, and there would be regular trips: hikes into the mountains, the Sierras, the Sespe River Valley, and different places.

  Keith Carradine

  School, California, Rivers

  "Keith Carradine on 'Deadwood,' 'Fargo,' and Madonna". Interview with Will Harris, www.avclub.com. July 20, 2016.

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• The world is so tremendously spectacular that every visual, sense, and sparked connection swells my unrestrained passion for life. I find I feel this the most when I am immersed in nature and sliding into the bloodstream of the wilderness.

  Ian Somerhalder

  Passion, Connections, World

  "Interview with United Nations Goodwill Ambassador Ian Somerhalder". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com. May 01, 2014.

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• The only thing left worth saving is wilderness.

  Edward Abbey

  Saving, Left

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• The wilderness is gone, the buckskin man is gone, the painted Indian has hit the trail over the Great Divide, the hardships and privations of pioneer life which did so much to develop sterling manhood are now but a legend in history, and we must depend upon the Boy Scout movement to produce the MEN of the future.

  Daniel Carter Beard

  Men, Boys, Legends

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• The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.
  Remaining silent about the destruction of nature is an endorsement of that destruction.

  Edward Abbey

  Ideas, Needs, Defense

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• The sovereign quality of wilderness is the same wherever encountered.... Each manifestation has an unshackled quality-each stirs untapped longings-each gives a fillip to living-each has an unsurpassed lilt which bursts from the deepest wellsprings of life. These are the realities found in the wilderness of the Great Smoky Mountains.

  Harvey Broome

  Reality, Giving, Quality

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• One would think America big enough to set aside wilderness preserves for the many of our citizens who seek to escape the incessant crowd, to search for solace in solitude amidst a sanctuary far removed from the banality of beer ads and cigarette commercials.

  Frank Church

  Beer, Thinking, America

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• It is commonplace of all religious thought that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and live for a while in the wilderness. If he is of proper sort, he will return with a message. It may not be a message from the god he set out to seek but even if he has failed in that particular, he will have had a vision or seen a marvel and these are always worth listening to or thinking about.

  Loren Eiseley

  Religious, Men, Thinking

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