Two Things Hold Promise Of Improving Those

Barring Love And War, Few Enterprises Are Undertaken With Such Abandon, Or By Such Diverse Individuals, Or With So Paradoxical A Mixture Of Appetite And Altruism, As That Group Of Avocations Known As Outdoor Recreation. It Is, By Common Consent, A Good Thing For People To Get Back To Nature. But Wherein Lies The Goodness, And What Can Be Done To Encourage Its Pursuit?

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.

On Motionless Wing They Emerge From The Lifting Mists, Sweep A Final Arc Of Sky, And Settle In Clangorous Descending Spirals To Their Feeding Grounds. A New Day Has Begun On The Crane Marsh.

We Console Ourselves With The Comfortable Fallacy That A Single Museum Piece Will Do, Ignoring The Clear Dictum Of History That A Species Must Be Saved In Many Places If It Is To Be Saved At All.

We Realize The Indivisibility Of The Earth - Its Soil, Mountains, Rivers, Forests, Climate, Plants, And Animals - And Respect It Collectively Not Only As A Useful Servant But As A Living Being, Vastly Less Alive Than Ourselves In Degree, But Vastly Greater Than Ourselves In Time And Space - A Being That Was Old When The Morning Stars Sang Together, And When The Last Of Us Has Been Gathered Unto His Fathers, Will Still Be Young.