Quotes by Conservationists

I admire how she protects her energy and understands her limitations.

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchant-ments of later years the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial the alienation from the sources of our strength.

Rachel Carson

Do not attempt to do a thing unless you are sure of yourself but do not relinquish it simply because someone else is not sure of you.

Stewart E. White

If a child is too keep alive his inborn sense of wonder ... he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it rediscovering with him the joy excitement and mystery of the world we live in.

Rachel Carson

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road-the one less traveled by-offers our last our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.

Rachel Carson

Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good behave yourself and never mind the rest.

Beatrix Potter

A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.

Rachel Carson

Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good behave yourself and never mind the rest.

Beatrix Potter

Rachel Carson

For the sense of smell almost more than any other has the power to recall memories and it is a pity that we use it so little.

Rachel Carson

In every out-thrust headland in every curving beach in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.

Rachel Carson

I am always more interested in what I am about to do than in what I have already done.

Rachel Carson

Beginnings are apt to be shadowy.

Rachel Carson

We have no more right to put our discordant states of mind into the lives of those around us and rob them of their sunshine and brightness than we have to enter their houses and steal their silverware.

Julia Seton

Faith is the centerpiece of a connected life. It allows us to live by the grace of invisible strands. It is a belief in a wisdom superior to our own. Faith becomes a teacher in the absence of fact.

Terry Tempest Williams

For the first time in the history of the world every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals from the moment of conception until death.

Rachel Carson

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it rediscovering with him the joy excitement and mystery of the world we live in.

Rachel Carson

Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good behave yourself and never mind the rest.

Beatrix Potter

CONVERSATION is the vehicle for change.

Terry Tempest Williams

Not everything is meant for all to hear.

Terry Tempest Williams

Finding one’s voice is a process of finding one’s passion.

Terry Tempest Williams

We know the quality of another’s heart through her voice.

Terry Tempest Williams

Once you know that you have a voice,” Louis said, “it’s no longer the voice that matters, but what is behind the voice.

Terry Tempest Williams

Your voice is the wildest thing you own,” Brooke says to me. “And you’re giving it away. You can’t see it. Your obsession is blinding you.” He is angry. He is talking in shorthand. “You’re losing yourself.

Terry Tempest Williams

In the desert I often whisper. Junipers are excellent sounding boards. They have been shaped by wing. Rocks seem to care nothing about what I say, yet when I speak to them, they feel porous, capable of receiving my words and taking them in as part of their history of brokenness.

Terry Tempest Williams

A pencil is a wand and a weapon. Be careful. Protect yourself. It can be glorious.

Terry Tempest Williams

Conversation is the vehicle for change. We test our ideas. We hear our own voice in a concert with another. And inside those pauses of listening, we approach new territories of thought. A good argument, call it a discussion, frees us. Words fly out of our mouths like threatened birds. Once released, they may never return. If they do, they have chosen home and the bird-worms are calmed into an ars poetica.

Terry Tempest Williams

Can you be inside and outside at the same time?I think this is where I live.I think this is where most women live.I know this is where writers live.Inside to write. Outside to glean.

Terry Tempest Williams

My grandmother simply shook her head and said, "You know what you saw. The bird doesn't need to be counted, and neither do you.

Terry Tempest Williams

The more you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to avoid people.

Dian Fossey

It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons

Rachel Carson

We are most of us two people, your Highness. There is something lacking in the man who is one thing only, and so, as he believes, at peace with the world and with himself.

Robert Aickman

My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.

Terry Tempest Williams

Each of us has one. Each voice is distinct and has something to say. Each voice deserves to be heard. But it requires the act of listening.

Terry Tempest Williams

The next time you stand on a beach at night, watching the moon’s bright path across the water, and the conscious of the moon-drawn tides, remember that the moon itself may have been born of a great tidal wave of earthly substance, torn off into space. And remember if the moon was formed in this fashion, the event may have had much to do with shaping the ocean basins and the continents as we know them.

Rachel Carson

The best way to protect something is to set it free.

T.A. Barron

Water is nothing if not ingemination, an encore to the tenacity of life.

Terry Tempest Williams

Eventually man, too, found his way back to the sea. Standing on its shores, he must have looked out upon it with wonder and curiosity, compounded with an unconscious recognition of his lineage. He could not physically re-enter the ocean as the seals and whales had done. But over the centuries, with all the skill and ingenuity and reasoning powers of his mind, he has sought to explore and investigate even its most remote parts, so that he might re-enter it mentally and imaginatively.

Rachel Carson

For far too long we have been seduced into walking a path that did not lead us to ourselves. For far too long we have said yes when we wanted to say no. And for far too long we have said no when we desperately wanted to say yes. . . . When we don't listen to our intuition, we abandon our souls. And we abandon our souls because we are afraid if we don't, others will abandon us.

Terry Tempest Williams

Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is — or should be — the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all — perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction fol

Rachel Carson

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

Rachel Carson

We are accustomed to look for the gross and immediate effects and to ignore all else. Unless this appears promptly and in such obvious form that it cannot be ignored, we deny the existence of hazard. Even research men suffer from the handicap of inadequate methods of detecting the beginnings of injury. The lack of sufficiently delicate methods to detect injury before symptoms appear is one of the great unsolved problems in medicine.

Rachel Carson

Economy and environment are the same thing. That is the rule of nature.

Mollie Beattie

Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?

Rachel Carson

Peter was not very well during the evening. His mother put him to bed, and made some chamomile tea: "One table-spoonful to be taken at bedtime.

Beatrix Potter

I believe we must do things in our lives for the right reasons, because we enjoy doing them, with no expectation of getting something back in return. Otherwise, we are constantly being disappointed." She moved her turquoise bracelet back and forth on her wrist. "So I had two sons, John and Richard, because I wanted to, not because I thought they would rescue me in old age. I got out of all social organizations and clubs in my fifties so I could spend time with my grandchildren, not because they would give something back to Jack and me later on, but because that was what I wanted to do--and I have loved doing it. Believe me, these have been selfish decisions.

Terry Tempest Williams

Beauty is transformed over time, and not without destruction.

Terry Tempest Williams

Sunday, January 27, 1884. -- There was another story in the paper a week or so since. A gentleman had a favourite cat whom he taught to sit at the dinner table where it behaved very well. He was in the habit of putting any scraps he left onto the cat's plate. One day puss did not take his place punctually, but presently appeared with two mice, one of which it placed on its master's plate, the other on its own.

Beatrix Potter

Those who dwell , as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations and concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature--the reassurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

Rachel Carson

It is not learning we need at all. Individuals need learning but the culture needs something else, the pulse of light on the sea, the warm urge of huddling together to keep out the cold. We need empathy, we need the eyes that still can weep.

Lydia Millet

Today, I feel stronger, learning to live within the natural cycles of a day and to not expect too much of myself. As women, we hold the moon in our bellies. It is too much to ask to operate on full-moon energy three hundred and sixty-five days a year. I am in a crescent phase.

Terry Tempest Williams

It is strange that people train themselves so carefully to go to waste so prematurely

Robert Aickman

WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES when we go against our instincts? What are the consequences of not speaking out? What are the consequences of guilt, shame, and doubt?

Terry Tempest Williams

I hold that a strongly marked personality can influence descendants for generations.

Beatrix Potter

The only good cage is an empty cage.

Lawrence Anthony

But perhaps the most important lesson I learned is that there are no walls between humans and the elephants except those that we put up ourselves, and that until we allow not only elephants, but all living creatures their place in the sun, we can never be whole ourselves.

Lawrence Anthony

animals are indeed more ancient, more complex and in many ways more sophisticated than us. They are more perfect because they remain within Nature's fearful symmetry just as Nature intended. They should be respected and revered, but perhaps none more so than the elephant, the world's most emotionally human land mammal.

Daphne Sheldrick

Every wild thing is in tune with its surroundings, awake to its fate and in absolute harmony with the planet. Their attention is focused totally outwards. Humans, on the other hand, tend to focus introspectively on their own lives too often, brooding and magnifying problems that the animal kingdom would not waste a millisecond of energy upon. To most people, the magnificent order of the natural world where life and death actually mean something has become unrecognizable.

Lawrence Anthony

The rooms of his apartment were full with the dog home again, convalescing. He was satisfied to know, even when she was out of sight, that somewhere in the apartment she was sleeping or eating or sitting watchfully. It was family, he guessed, more or less. Did most people want a house of living things at night, to know that in the dark around them other warm bodies slept?Such a house could even be the whole world.

Lydia Millet

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