Health Is The Capacity Of The Land

The Government Tells Us We Need Flood Control And Comes To Straighten The Creek In Our Pasture. The Engineer On The Job Tells Us The Creek Is Now Able To Carry Off More Flood Water, But In The Process We Have Lost Our Old Willows Where The Owl Hooted On A Winter Night And Under Which The Cows Switched Flies In The Noon Shade. We Lost The Little Marshy Spot Where Our Fringed Gentians Bloomed.

Twenty Centuries Of 'progress' Have Brought The Average Citizen A Vote, A National Anthem, A Ford, A Bank Account, And A High Opinion Of Himself, But Not The Capacity To Live In High Density Without Befouling And Denuding His Environment, Nor A Conviction That Such Capacity, Rather Than Such Density, Is The True Test Of Whether He Is Civilized.

Only Economists Mistake Physical Opulence For Riches.

I Am Asserting That Those Who Love The Wilderness Should Not Be Wholly Deprived Of It, That While The Reduction Of The Wilderness Has Been A Good Thing, Its Extermination Would Be A Very Bad One, And That The Conservation Of Wilderness Is The Most Urgent And Difficult Of All The Tasks That Confront Us, Because There Are No Economic Laws To Help And Many To Hinder Its Accomplishment.

There Is Yet No Ethic Dealing With Man's Relation To Land And To The Animals And Plants Which Grow Upon It. Land, Like Odysseus' Slave-girls, Is Still Property. The Land-relation Is Still Strictly Economic, Entailing Privileges But Not Obligations.