February 2, 1968

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,
war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

- Wendell Berry

...Nature's polluted,
There's man in every secret corner of her
Doing damned, wicked deeds.

-Edward Abbey

...question whether we cannot have both progress and plants.

- Aldo Leopold

The place itself is always more remarkable than any picture of it.

- Robert Adams

There are so many stories,
more beautiful than answers.

- Mary Oliver

...at daybreak I am the sole owner of all the acres I can walk over. It is not only the boundaries that disappear, but also the thought of being bounded.

- Aldo Leopold

And here, too, one learns that the world, though made, is yet being made; that this is still the morning of creation; that mountains long conceived are now being born, channels traced for coming rivers, basins hollowed for lakes; that moraine soil is being ground and outspread for coming plants, - coarse boulders and gravel for forests finer soil for grasses and flowers, - while the finest part of the grist, seen hastening out to sea in the draining streams, is being stored away in darkness and builded particle on particle, cementing and crystallizing, to make the mountains and valleys and plains of other predestined landscapes, to be followed by still others in endless rhythm and beauty.

- John Muir

...I am reminded that it is no small thing to inhabit our place on the carnivorous continuum - a place where we not only consume animals, but in turn consent to the possibility of being consumed. This place, an edge of sorts, awakens us to our biological inheritance, and we become viscerally, sensually invested in our surroundings and their ability to sustain us.

- Amy Irvine

...representation is always partial, else it would not be representation, but some kind of haunting double....the terra incongnita spaces on maps say that knowledge also is an island surrounded by oceans of the unknown.

- Rebecca Solnit

- For the Children -

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

- Gary Snyder

Here's my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts, but the mood around the country - the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office.

- Barack Obama

Do something.

That’s what I want you to do. That’s what the anadromous fish and the Appalachian mountaintops want you to do too.

- Derrick Jensen

- The Peace of Wild Things -

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

- Wendell Berry