A Thing Is Right When It Tends

Our Remnants Of Wilderness Will Yield Bigger Values To The Nation's Character And Health Than They Will To Its Pocketbook, And To Destroy Them Will Be To Admit That The Latter Are The Only Values That Interest Us.

Conservationists Have, I Fear, Adopted The Pedagogical Method Of The Prophets: We Mutter Darkly About Impending Doom If People Don't Mend Their Ways. The Doom Is Impending, All Right; No One Can Be An Ecologist, Even An Amateur One, Without Seeing It. But Do People Mend Their Ways For Fear Of Calamity? I Doubt It. They Are More Likely To Do It Out Of Pure Curiosity And Interest.

We All Strive For Safety, Prosperity, Comfort, Long Life, And Dullness. The Deer Strives With His Supple Legs, The Cowman With Trap And Poison, The Statesman With Pen, The Most Of Us With Machines, Votes, And Dollars. A Measure Of Success In This Is All Well Enough, And Perhaps Is A Requisite To Objective Thinking, But Too Much Safety Seems To Yield Only Danger In The Long Run. Perhaps This Is Behind Thoreau's Dictum: In Wilderness Is The Salvation Of The World. Perhaps This Is The Hidden Meaning In The Howl Of The Wolf, Long Known Among Mountains, But Seldom Perceived Among Men.

One Of The Anomalies Of Modern Ecology Is The Creation Of Two Groups, Each Of Which Seems Barely Aware Of The Existence Of The Other. The One Studies The Human Community, Almost As If It Were A Separate Entity, And Calls Its Findings Sociology, Economics And History. The Other Studies The Plant And Animal Community And Comfortably Relegates The Hodge-podge Of Politics To The Liberal Arts. The Inevitable Fusion Of These Two Lines Of Thought Will, Perhaps, Constitute The Outstanding Advance Of This Century.

Never Did We Plan The Morrow, For We Had Learned That In The Wilderness Some New And Irresistible Distraction Is Sure To Turn Up Each Day Before Breakfast. Like The River, We Were Free To Wander.