Conservation Of Forest Quotes

What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.

If we want to use forests as a weapon in the fight against climate change, then we must allow them to grow old, which is exactly what large conservation groups are asking us to do.

They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.

If you love a tree you will be more beautiful than before!

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .

A man who seeks only the light, while shirking his responsibilities, will never find illumination. And one who keep his eyes fixed upon the sun ends up blind..." "It doesn't matter what others think -because that's what they will think, in any case. So, relax. Let the universe move about. Discover the joy of surprising yourself." "The master says: “Make use of every blessing that God gave you today. A blessing cannot be saved. There is no bank where we can deposit blessings received, to use them when we see fit. If you do not use them, they will be irretrievably lost. God knows that we are creative artists when it comes to our lives. On one day, he gives us clay for sculpting, on another, brushes and canvas, or a pen. But we can never use clay on our canvas, nor pens in sculpture. Each day has its own miracle. Accept the blessings, work, and create your minor works of art today. Tomorrow you will receive others.” “You are together because a forest is always stronger than a solitary tree,” the master answered. "The forest conserves humidity, resists the hurricane and helps the soil to be fertile. But what makes a tree strong is its roots. And the roots of a plant cannot help another plant to grow. To be joined together in the same purpose is to allow each person to grow in his own fashion, and that is the path of those who wish to commune with God.” “If you must cry, cry like a child. You were once a child, and one of the first things you learned in life was to cry, because crying is a part of life. Never forget that you are free, and that to show your emotions is not shameful. Scream, sob loudly, make as much noise as you like. Because that is how children cry, and they know the fastest way to put their hearts at ease. Have you ever noticed how children stop crying? They stop because something distracts them. Something calls them to the next adventure. Children stop crying very quickly. And that's how it will be for you. But only if you can cry as children do.” “If you are traveling the road of your dreams, be committed to it. Do not leave an open door to be used as an excuse such as, 'Well, this isn't exactly what I wanted. ' Therein are contained the seeds of defeat. “Walk your path. Even if your steps have to be uncertain, even if you know that you could be doing it better. If you accept your possibilities in the present, there is no doubt that you will improve in the future. But if you deny that you have limitations, you will never be rid of them. “Confront your path with courage, and don't be afraid of the criticism of others. And, above all, don't allow yourself to become paralyzed by self-criticism. “God will be with you on your sleepless nights, and will dry your tears with His love. God is for the valiant.” "Certain things in life simply have to be experienced -and never explained. Love is such a thing." "There is a moment in every day when it is difficult to see clearly: evening time. Light and darkness blend, and nothing is completely clear nor completely dark." "But it's not important what we think, or what we do or what we believe in: each of us will die one day. Better to do as the old Yaqui Indians did: regard death as an advisor. Always ask: 'Since I'm going to die, what should I be doing now?'” "When we follow our dreams, we may give the impression to others that we are miserable and unhappy. But what others think is not important. What is important is the joy in our heart.” “There is a work of art each of us was destined to create. That is the central point of our life, and -no matter how we try to deceive ourselves -we know how important it is to our happiness. Usually, that work of art is covered by years of fears, guilt and indecision. But, if we decide to remove those things that do not belong, if we have no doubt as to our capability, we are capable of going forward with the mission that is our destiny. That is the only way to live with honor.

Caring a tree is caring of your soul.

If people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.

Devoted though we must be to the conservation cause, I do not believe that any of us should give it all of our time or effort or heart. Give what you can, but do not burn yourselves out -- or break your hearts. Let us save at least half of our lives for the enjoyment of this wonderful world which still exists. Leave your dens, abandon your cars and walk out into the great mountains, the deserts, the forests, the seashores. Those treasures still belong to all of us. Enjoy them to the full, stretch your legs, expand your lungs, enliven your hearts -- and we will outlive the greedy swine who want to destroy it all in the name of what they call GROWTH. God bless America -- let's save some of it. Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet!

Can there be any question that the human is the least harmonious beast in the forest and the creature most toxic to the nest?

The world has a very serious problem, my friend' Shiva went on. 'Poor children still die by their millions. Westerners and the global rich -- like me -- live in post-scarcity society, while a billion people struggle to get enough to eat. And we're pushing the planet towards a tipping point, where the corals die and the forests burn and life becomes much, much harder. We have the resources to solve those problems, even now, but politics and economics and nationalism all get in the way. If we could access all those minds, though...

Pandas and rain forests are never mentioned when it comes to the millions of people taking joyrides in their Range Rovers. Rather, it's the little things we're strong-armed into conserving. At a chain coffee bar in San Francisco, I saw a sign near the cream counter that read NAPKINS COME FROM TREES - CONSERVE! In case you missed the first sign, there was a second one two feet away, reading YOU WASTE NAPKINS - YOU WASTE TREES!!! The cups, of course, are also made of paper, yet there's no mention of the mighty redwood when you order your four-dollar coffee. The guilt applies only to those things that are being given away for free.

Plant a tree in your lifetime.

Spraying to kill trees and and raspberry bushes after a clear-cut merely looks unaesthetic for a short time, but tree plantations are deliberate ecodeath. Yet, tree planting is often pictorially advertised on television and in national magazines by focusing on cupped caring hands around a seedling. But forests do not need this godlike interference... Planting tree plantations is permanent deforestation... The extensive planting of just one exotic species removes thousands of native species.

We must stop seeing the natural world as a commodity and start seeing it as we would see a family member, something to love, protect, care for, and cherish.

If you destroy thriving woodlands to establish a so-called smart city, it won’t be a ‘development.’ Development and conservation should go hand in hand.

The making of gardens and parks goes on with civilization all over the world, and they increase both in size and number as their value is recognized. Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike. This natural beauty-hunger is made manifest in the little windowsill gardens of the poor, though perhaps only a geranium slip in a broken cup, as well as in the carefully tended rose and lily gardens of the rich, the thousands of spacious city parks and botanical gardens, and in our magnificent National Parks—the Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, etc.—Nature's sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world. Nevertheless, like anything else worth while, from the very beginning, however well guarded, they have always been subject to attack by despoiling gain-seekers and mischief-makers of every degree from Satan to Senators, eagerly trying to make everything immediately and selfishly commercial, with schemes disguised in smug-smiling philanthropy, industriously, sham-piously crying, "Conservation, conservation, panutilization," that man and beast may be fed and the dear Nation made great. Thus long ago a few enterprising merchants utilized the Jerusalem temple as a place of business instead of a place of prayer, changing money, buying and selling cattle and sheep and doves; and earlier still, the first forest reservation, including only one tree, was likewise despoiled. Ever since the establishment of the Yosemite National Park, strife has been going on around its borders and I suppose this will go on as part of the universal battle between right and wrong, however much of its boundaries may be shorn, or its wild beauty destroyed.

Community, then, is an indispensable term in any discussion of the connection between people and land. A healthy community is a form that includes all the local things that are connected by the larger, ultimately mysterious form of the Creation. In speaking of community, then, we are speaking of a complex connection not only among human beings or between humans and their homeland but also between human economy and nature, between forest or prairie and field or orchard, and between troublesome creatures and pleasant ones. All neighbors are included. (pg. 202-203, Conservation and Local Economy)

Trees are great messengers of peace. One of the worst crimes of modern humankind is indiscriminate cutting down of the trees, and forests, in the pursuit of establishing civilization. No wonder, that modern civilized society has everything but peace.

My heart speeds up slightly at the sight of them so close, so intimate, and I suddenly feel worried about my friend. It’s one thing to wish Jarod was Gardnerian in the abstract. But he isn’t. He’s the son of his people’s alpha, and Aislinn’s from one of the most conservative families in Gardneria. Our people hate each other. No, this isn’t good. This is a road best not traveled down—a road leading straight off a cliff.

Even viewed conservatively, trees are worth far more than they cost to plant and maintain. The U.S. Forest Service's Center for Urban Forest Research found a ten-degree difference between the cool of a shaded park in Tucson and the open Sonoran desert. A tree planted in the right place, the center estimates, reduces the demand for air conditioning and can save 100 kilowatt hours in annual electrical use, about 2 to 8 percent of total use. Strategically planted trees can also shelter homes from wind, and in cold weather they can reduce heating fuel costs by 10 to 12 percent. A million strategically planted trees, the center figures, can save $10 million in energy costs. And trees increase property values, as much as 1 percent for each mature tree. These savings are offset somewhat by the cost of planting and maintaining trees, but on balance, if we had to pay for the services that trees provide, we couldn't afford them. Because trees offer their services in silence, and for free, we take them for granted.

What obligation is more binding than to protect the cherished, to defend whoever or whatever cannot defend itself, and to nurture in turn that which has given nourishment? I’m reminded of words written by John Seed, an Australian environmentalist. When he began considering these questions, he believed, “I am protecting the rain forest.” But as his thought evolved, he realized, “I am part of the rain forest protecting myself.

Every man ought to plant a tree.

That’s when he finds them. Birds. Mammals. Reptiles. That one was George—a Cheetah with the most flaming fur. That one was Gogy—a gorilla with the clearest pair of eyes. That one was Ms. Mimbo—a hybrid of Macao and African Grey Parrot. And the one near the stone was … well, the Monk goes through around three dozen names. It took fifty years of careful watch to make sure they don’t go extinct. If you live long enough, you might, as well, end up befriending every life your neighboring forest holds. And if you are a war hero, you might even get professionals from the Wildlife Conservation Board to help you during their crossbreeding process. But they’re all dead.

We forest officers, who acquiesced in the extinguishment of the bear, knew a local rancher who had plowed up a dagger engraved with the name of one of Coronado´s captains. We spoke harshly of the Spaniards, who, in their zeal for gold and converts, had needlessly extinguished the native Indians. It did not occur to us that we, too, were the captains of an invasion too sure of its righteousness.

All forests in the world need to be given the same name, so that people can understand that there is only one forest in the world and that every burning forest is his own forest, no matter where in the world!

The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Republicans has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the rest of us and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.

It is evident that the chief feeling induced by woody country is one of reverence for its antiquity. There is a quiet melancholy about the decay of the patriarchal trunks, which is enhanced by the green and elastic vigor of the young saplings; the noble form of the forest aisles, and the subdued light which penetrates their entangled boughs, combine to add to the impression; and the whole character of the scene is calculated to excite conservative feeling. The man who could remain a radical in a wood country is a disgrace to his species.

Unfurl my body, wind, lift me up into the branches of a majestic beauty that guides a people through life. I would sway with you, branches, taking that journey across the ages. Tossing my own mane of leaves through the quiet, awaiting air. Silently, I choose to engage with your wisdom.

The busybody (banned as sexist, demeaning to older women) who lives next door called my daughter a tomboy (banned as sexist) when she climbed the jungle (banned; replaced with "rain forest") gym. Then she had the nerve to call her an egghead and a bookworm (both banned as offensive; replaced with "intellectual") because she read fairy (banned because suggests homosexuality; replace with "elf") tales. I'm tired of the Language Police turning a deaf ear (banned as handicapism) to my complaints. I'm no Pollyanna (banned as sexist) and will not accept any lame (banned as offensive; replace with "walks with a cane") excuses at this time. If Alanis Morrissette can play God (banned) in Dogma (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "Doctrine" or "Belief"), why can't my daughter play stickball (banned as regional or ethnic bias) on boy's night out (banned as sexist)? Why can't she build a snowman (banned, replace with "snow person") without that fanatic (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "believer," "follower," or "adherent") next door telling her she's going to hell (banned; replaced with "heck" or "darn")? Do you really think this is what the Founding Fathers (banned as sexist; replace with "the Founders" or "the Framers") had in mind? That we can't even enjoy our Devil (banned)-ed ham sandwiches in peace? I say put a stop to this cult (banned as ethnocentric) of PC old wives' tales (banned as sexist; replace with "folk wisdom") and extremist (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "believer," "follower," or "adherent") conservative duffers (banned as demeaning to older men). As an heiress (banned as sexist; replace with "heir") to the first amendment, I feel that only a heretic (use with caution when comparing religions) would try to stop American vernacular from flourishing in all its inspirational (banned as patronizing when referring to a person with disabilities) splendor.

I am convinced that most Americans of the new generation have no idea what a decent forest looks like. The only way to tell them is to show them.

Park rangers are about conservation. Forest rangers are about resource management.” “Resource management. So, like, logging and stuff.” “Logging,” I say. “Water quality. Wildlife.

There are some things that, once lost, no amount of money can regain. Thus to justify the destruction of an ancient forest on the grounds that it will earn us substantial export income is problematic, even if we could invest that income and increase its value from year to year; for no matter how much we increase its value, its could never buy back the link with the past represented by the forest.

Do you know how many acres of beautiful forests and moors have been destroyed by your company? How many animals have lost their homes and how many trees have been murdered? I am sick of being bothered by you people.

If the real human environment in developed countries today is third-growth monocultured “forests,” tar-sand petroleum, cow-burnt grasslands, and smog-like clouds of microplastics floating in oceans where fish once thrived, then human cultures need to distinguish between sentimentality about loss and the imperative to survive. They need to establish a more relevant politics than the competitive politics of nation-states. And to found economies built not on profit but on conservation.

In the boreal forests there is reason to hope that we’ll guide the human part of this relationship with forethought. Over the last two decades, continent wide planning for conservation, forestry, and industry in the boreal forest have brought people together who have fought for years in the law courts. Now timber companies, industry, conservation groups, environmental activists, and governments, including those of the First Nations, are talking to one another. Such human talk is part of the forest’s larger system of thought, one way that the living network can achieve a measure of coherence; a diffuse conversation, able to listen and to adapt. To date, swaths of boreal forest as big as many countries- hundreds of thousands of square kilometers- more than 10 percent of Canada’s boreal forest- have been mapped for conservation, for carbon-savvy logging, for threatened animals, and for sustainable timber production.

But Brinker came in. I think he made a point of visiting all the rooms near him the first day. “Well, Gene,” his beaming face appeared around the door. Brinker looked the standard preparatory school article in his gray gabardine suit with square, hand-sewn-looking jacket pockets, a conservative necktie, and dark brown cordovan shoes. His face was all straight lines— eyebrows, mouth, nose, everything—and he carried his six feet of height straight as well. He looked but happened not to be athletic, being too busy with politics, arrangements, and offices. There was nothing idiosyncratic about Brinker unless you saw him from behind; I did as he turned to close the door after him. The flaps of his gabardine jacket parted slightly over his healthy rump, and it is that, without any sense of derision at all, that I recall as Brinker’s salient characteristic, those healthy, determined, not over-exaggerated but definite and substantial buttocks.

A small cabin stands in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, about a hundred yards off a trail that crosses the Cascade Range. In midsummer, the cabin looked strange in the forest. It was only twelve feet square, but it rose fully two stories and then had a high and steeply peaked roof. From the ridge of the roof, moreover, a ten-foot pole stuck straight up. Tied to the top of the pole was a shovel. To hikers shedding their backpacks at the door of the cabin on a cold summer evening -- as the five of us did -- it was somewhat unnerving to look up and think of people walking around in snow perhaps thirty-five feet above, hunting for that shovel, then digging their way down to the threshold. [1971]

I AM WRITING IN A time of great anxiety in my country. I understand the anxiety, but also believe America is going to be fine. I choose to see opportunity as well as danger. Donald Trump’s presidency threatens much of what is good in this nation. We all bear responsibility for the deeply flawed choices put before voters during the 2016 election, and our country is paying a high price: this president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values. His leadership is transactional, ego driven, and about personal loyalty. We are fortunate some ethical leaders have chosen to serve and to stay at senior levels of government, but they cannot prevent all of the damage from the forest fire that is the Trump presidency. Their task is to try to contain it. I see many so-called conservative commentators, including some faith leaders, focusing on favorable policy initiatives or court appointments to justify their acceptance of this damage, while deemphasizing the impact of this president on basic norms and ethics. That strikes me as both hypocritical and morally wrong. The hypocrisy is evident if you simply switch the names and imagine that a President Hillary Clinton had conducted herself in a similar fashion in office. I’ve said this earlier but it’s worth repeating: close your eyes and imagine these same voices if President Hillary Clinton had told the FBI director, “I hope you will let it go,” about the investigation of a senior aide, or told casual, easily disprovable lies nearly every day and then demanded we believe them. The hypocrisy is so thick as to almost be darkly funny. I say this as someone who has worked in law enforcement for most of my life, and served presidents of both parties. What is happening now is not normal. It is not fake news. It is not okay.

On a winter’s day when a person’s spirits may be low and to behold thirty to one-hundred Evening Grosbeaks busily gorging themselves on bird seed and perched in a stand of pines with all of them creating a cacophony of sparrow like chirps, this is real therapy for me. It is an act of contagious optimism. It is at such times I realize that a bird can do more for me than a shrink.

We are not just protecting nature somewhere out there or giving things up simply to prevent the extinction of apparently unimportant beetles or species of birds. On the contrary, with every step we take to help conserve the ecosystem that is the Earth, we are at the same time protecting ourselves and our quality of life, simply because we are a fully functioning part of the whole. Environmental conservation is and must be—literally and in the best sense of the word—about just one thing: self-care.

I've been developing killer updated versions of things like Black Forest cake, now with bittersweet devil's food cake, a dried-cherry conserve, and whipped vanilla creme fraiche. I've perfected a new carrot cake, adding candied chunks of parsnips and rum-soaked golden raisins to the cake and mascarpone to the frosting. And my cheeky take on homemade Pop-Tarts will be available in three flavors- blueberry, strawberry, and peanut butter and jelly- and I've even ordered fun little silver Mylar bags to pack them in.

Trees evolved to grow together in a forest. They intertwine their roots, forming a root matrix that is nearly impossible to uproot. Forest trees with interlocked roots may snap off in big winds, but they typically don’t uproot. Because aesthetics have trumped function for so long, we have planted large, isolated specimen trees ready to blow over nearly everywhere. If we change our goal from creating majestic specimen trees to picturesque groves of trees, the interlocking effect of root matrices will be strongest.

As to the reserved and withdrawn areas, excluding and excepting only the national parks, it is manifest that justice, equality, and dignity for these States require that ultimately all should be ceded to the States wherein they lie. The theory that the Western States can not intelligently and wisely administer these areas, for example, the forest reserves, is based on the delinquencies and wastefulness of the States to the eastward which had their resources and their opportunity, and in some cases, as States, misused and abused their rights. This constitutes no reason as to why the same right which they enjoyed should be denied to the Western states.

Mais l idéologie proclamée de Forest Lawn est la même que celle du musée Getty qui est gratuitement ouvert au public. C est l idéologie de la conservation, au Nouveau Monde, des trésors que l imprévoyance et le désintérêt du Vieux Monde sont en train de réduire a néant. Naturellement cette ideologie occulte quelque chose: le desir du profit, dans le cas du cimetiere, et, dans le cas de Getty, le fait que la colonisation affairiste du Nouveau Monde (dont fait partie aussi l empire petrolier de Paul Getty) a affaibli le le Vieux. Cest exactement les larmes de crocodile du patricien romain qui reproduisait les grandeurs de cette Grece que son pays avait rabaissee au rang de colonie.

I’m a lifelong environmentalist. My voice piped at age ten: “I give my pledge as an American to save and faithfully to defend from waste the natural resources of my country—its air, soil, and minerals, its forests, waters, and wildlife.” I got infected by that Conservation Pledge through the magazine Outdoor Life and proceeded to paste it on everything and everyone around me. Since the concept of pledge has long been rendered meaningless by the surreal Pledge of Allegiance that American schoolchildren have to recite, what I meant in 1948—and mean now—is: “I declare my intent to save and defend from waste the world’s natural resources—its air, soil, and minerals, its forests, waters, and wildlife.

Some modern Pagans claim to be staunchly apolitical, seeing radical Paganism as a highly unwelcome trend that corrupts religion by mixing it with politics. Political neutrality is conservative by default. When the entire world is under threat from industrial capitalism, what does it mean for a Pagan to be apolitical? It can only mean that you will allow mountains be blown apart for coal, forests to be clear-cut, rivers to be poisoned, and the Earth to be overheated until it becomes unlivable. From the perspective of animism, that can only mean that you are no friend to the spirits but a collaborator with those who would destroy them and leave us all with a dead world. Pagan anarchists don't make rules for other people. No one is saying that a Pagan is "not allowed" to be a supporter of capitalism. You're always allowed to do whatever you choose- but that doesn't mean it makes sense. You can be an "apolitical Pagan" if you want, but the consequence of your apolitical position will be the death of everything you claim to worship.

Tourists enter Tehran from the south on a carriageway built by order of the Shah. On the city’s outskirts they pass through the green belt he envisioned would protect Tehran from the twin scourges of desert wind and dust. In the central city visitors pass by the government ministries, hospitals, universities, schools, concert halls, monuments, bridges, sports complexes, hotels, museums, galleries, and gleaming underground metro that were among his many pet projects. … He championed the social welfare state that today provides Iranians with access to state-run health care and education. He raised the scholarship money that allowed hundreds of thousands of Iranian university students, including many luminaries of the Islamic Republic, to study abroad at leading American and European universities. The Shah ordered the fighter jets that made Iran’s air force the most powerful in southwestern Asia. He established the first national parks and state forests and ordered strict water, animal, and conservation measures. Perhaps it is no surprise that Iran today has the look and feel of a haunted house. The man who built modern Iran is nowhere to be seen but his presence is felt everywhere. The revolutionaries who replaced the Shah may not like to hear it, but Iran today is as much his country as it is theirs.

I will invest my heart's desire and the work of my hands in things that will outlive me. Although it grieves me that houses are burning, I have fallen in love with freedom regardless, and the entitlement of a woman to get a move on, equipped with boots that fit and opinions that might matter. The treasures I carry closest to my heart are things I can't own: the curve of a five-year-old's forehead in profile, and the vulnerable expectation in the hand that reaches for mine as we cross the street. The wake-up call of birds in a forest. The intensity of the light fifteen minutes before the end of day; the color wash of a sunset on mountains; the ripe sphere of that same sun hanging low in a dusty sky in a breathtaking photograph from Afghanistan. In my darkest times I have to walk, sometimes alone, in some green place. Other people must share this ritual. For some I suppose it must be the path through a particular set of city streets, a comforting architecture; for me it's the need to stare at water until my mind comes to rest on nothing at all. Then I can go home. I can clear the brush from a neglected part of the garden, working slowly until it comes to me that here is one small place I can make right for my family. I can plant something as an act of faith in time itself, a vow that we will, sure enough, have a fall and a winter this year, to be followed again by spring. This is not an end in itself, but a beginning. I work until my mind can run a little further on its tether, tugging at this central pole of my sadness, forgetting it for a minute or two while pondering a school meeting next week, the watershed conservation project our neighborhood has undertaken, the farmer's market it organized last year: the good that becomes possible when a small group of thoughtful citizens commit themselves to it...Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.

The concept of the biotic pump, if correct, brings a new urgency to the need to conserve forests.

If the day comes when our descendants can venture with wonder into chestnut forests, we will have gained back more than a perfect tree. We will have gained a new reason for hope.

Planting their orchards for millennia, the first Amazonians slowly transformed large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings. In the country inhabited by the Ka’apor, on the mainland southeast of Marajó, centuries of tinkering have profoundly changed the forest community. In Ka’apor-managed forests, according to Balée’s plant inventories, almost half of the ecologically important species are those used by humans for food. In similar forests that have not recently been managed, the figure is only 20 percent. Balée cautiously estimated, in a widely cited article published in 1989, that at least 11.8 percent, about an eighth, of the nonflooded Amazon forest was “anthropogenic”—directly or indirectly created by humans. Some researchers today regard this figure as conservative. “I basically think it’s all human created,” Clement told me. So does Erickson, the University of Pennsylvania archaeologist who told me in Bolivia that the lowland tropical forests of South America are among the finest works of art on the planet. “Some of my colleagues would say that’s pretty radical,” he said. According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York in Binghamton, “lots” of researchers believe that “what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia.” The phrase “built environment,” Erickson argued, “applies to most, if not all, Neotropical landscapes.

While I lingered about the old village and the lake, with the water lapping on the shore and the wind whispering in the big pines, I felt for a moment that I was back in time among the Ojibwe families going about their business.

The Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC, was set up in 1933 to give work to young men who were unemployed and whose families were having a hard time of it. President Roosevelt had just changed the age minimum for the Corps and Gene joined up to go off on what he expected to be a great adventure, rebuilding the roads, bridges, and forests of America.

As we hiked deep into the forest, I swallowed down anger as my clients—mostly older and wealthy, often conservative—weighed in on the health-care debates, usually on the side of politicians whose plans would have left me without care for the foreseeable

Another middle-sized (six thousand) Southern university on the move. Conservative by national standards, although it severed its ties to the ultraconservative Southern Baptists in 1986. ACC athletics and Greek parties shape the social scene. The strategic central North Carolina location is accessible to mountains, beaches, and the famous research triangle. (Rising Stars - Wake Forest University)

Indigenous people from Brazil to Uganda are finding that some of the most aggressive land grabbing is being done by conservation organizations. A forest is suddenly rebranded a carbon offset and is put off-limits to its traditional inhabitants. As a result, the carbon offset market has created a whole new class of green human rights abuses, with farmers and Indigenous people being physically attacked by park rangers or private security when they try to access these lands.

The twin threats of deforestation and fire prompted the private and public sectors to act. Large firms like Weyerhaeuser began fire prevention programs and invested in sustainable yield research. The federal government instituted measures to conserve the nation's forests in 1891 with passage of the Forest Reserves Act. Under the leadership of President Grover Cleveland and later President Theodore Roosevelt, the federal government set aside 12.5 million acres in forest reserves in Washington, more than 25% of its total land mass.

Any control we exert is illusory and brief. Eventually, the pine forest builds up enough fuel and fire is far bigger than it would've been if we had allowed natural fire; the levee gives out in a hurricane, the plutonium builds up in someone's bones, the bacteria outsmart the antibiotics, and the soil becomes exhausted. Even the science of conservation, in its efforts to "manage" land, operates under an assumption that people control nature.

Just Because You Can Replant Forests, Is Not Permission To Deplete The Indigenous Ones.

I wanted to help rescue this species from endangerment by learning about the elephants’ intricate social structure, increasing worldwide attention to this species through my research and scientific advancements in knowledge. However, when the scientific papers that I had spent years writing finally came out, there was little reaction. I felt proud of my scientific accomplishments but was sad that I wasn’t doing more for the species that I cared about so much. The following year after I graduated, a new paper by one of my colleagues in Gabon found that between 2002-2011, the duration of my Ph.D. plus a few years, over 60% of the entire forest elephant population declined due to poaching[5]. The poaching was almost exclusively driven by the consumption of their tusks as sources for carving statues, jewelry, and other decorative objects. The true conservation issue had nothing to do with studying the elephants themselves. What was the point of studying a species if it might not exist in a few decades?  If I really wanted to help forest elephants, I should have been studying the people, the consumers who were purchasing ivory to determine if there were ways to change attitudes towards ivory and purchasing behavior. Yes, having rangers on the ground to protect parks and elephants is important, but if there is no decrease in demand, it will constantly be an uphill battle. All of the solutions to the conservation problems of forest elephants are social, political, and economic first.  If you are interested in pursuing wildlife biology as a career for conservation purposes (like I was) or because you love animals (also me), you might be better suited in another career if research is not your thing but can still work for a conservation organization. Nonprofits need lawyers, financial planners, fundraising experts, and marketing executives to name a few. When I perused the job boards of nonprofit organizations, I was surprised by how few research positions there were. There were far more in fundraising, marketing, and development. Even if you don’t work directly for conservation, honestly, you can still make a difference and help conservation efforts in other ways outside of your career. A lot of conservation is really about investing in programs and habitat, so species stay protected. For example, if you can purchase and/or donate money to organizations that buy large areas of land, this land can be set aside for wildlife conservation. The biggest threat to wildlife is habitat loss and simply buying more land, keeping it undeveloped, and/or restoring it for species to live on, is one of the major means to solve the biodiversity crisis.

By elevating the conservation status of supposedly pristine parts of nature, and disregarding the rest – the new wild – conservationists end up complicit in forest destruction and biodiversity loss. *

You did this to us," Albin was saying, Eithnie managed to shake her head. No. It wasn't me. But she found it hard to argue. People were poisoning the water, the air. She'd always known that the forest she loved was slowly dying, if not in her lifetime, then in the next. Wildlife and their habitats were disappearing at an alarming rate, taking with them the spirits of the land as well.

I have the greatest respect for conservation biologists. I care very much about conserving the rain forest and the wildlife in Indonesia, but I also found it disheartening. It often feels like you are fighting a losing battle, especially in areas where people depend so heavily on these natural resources for their own survival. After graduation, I decided to return to the original behavioral questions that motivated me. Although monogamy—both social and genetic—is rare in mammals, social monogamy is the norm in birds. Plus, birds are everywhere. I figured that if I turned my attention to studying our feathered friends, I wouldn’t have to spend months on end trying to secure research permits and travel visas from foreign governments. I wouldn’t even have to risk getting bitten by leeches (a constant problem in the Mentawais*). Birds seemed like the perfect choice for my next act. But I didn’t know anyone who studied birds. My PhD was in an anthropology department, without many links to researchers in biology departments. Serendipitously, while applying for dozens of academic jobs, I stumbled across an advertisement for a position managing Dr. Ellen Ketterson’s laboratory at Indiana University. The ad described Ketterson’s long-term project on dark-eyed juncos. Eureka! Birds! At the time, her lab primarily focused on endocrinology methods like hormone assays (a method to measure how much of a hormone is present in blood or other types of biological samples), because they were interested in how testosterone levels influenced behavior. I had no experience with either birds or hormone assays. But I had spent the last several years developing DNA sequencing and genotyping skills, which the Ketterson lab was just starting to use. I hoped that my expertise with fieldwork and genetic work would be seen as beneficial enough to excuse my lack of experience in ornithology and endocrinology. I submitted my application but heard nothing back. After a while, I did something that was a bit terrifying at the time. Of the dozens of academic positions I had applied to, this felt like the right one, so I tried harder. I wrote to Dr. Ketterson again to clarify why I was so interested in the job and why I would be a good fit, even though on paper I seemed completely wrong for it. I described why I wanted to work with birds instead of primates. I explained that I had years of fieldwork experience in challenging environments and could easily learn ornithological methods. I listed my laboratory expertise and elaborated on how beneficial it could be to her research group, and how easily I could learn to do hormone assays and why they were important for my research too. She wrote me back. I got the job.

Tabby hugged her. “I’ll stick to weather and politics. But, wait . . . is he liberal or conservative?” “You know, I’m not sure.” “What? That’s the first thing I have to know!” “It hasn’t come up,” Jo said.

It had preserved nearly 50,000 acres of land in 23 countries, which had had a tremendous positive effect on the enviroment and the communities of northeast Ohio. It has permanently preserved meadows, streams, wetlands, forests, camps, parks, and family farms, enabling flora and fauna to flourish.

the people understand that protecting the forest is not just for wildlife but for their own future, and so they have become our partners in conservation

many of the racial alarmists were also leaders in the nation’s new conservation movement. The blue-blooded toffs who feared that the noble and superior white race was menaced by unwashed rabble also saw wild landscapes as noble and superior wildernesses menaced by the same rabble. Prizing the expert governance of resources, they found little difference between protecting forests and cleaning up the human gene pool.

Were there land-hogs trying to corral grazing empires in PoweII’s time, and not above barefaced trespass on the public domain? They are still there, only now they are trying to bite out of national parks and national forests chunks of grazing land, oil land, timberland, that they covet. The conservation forces swamped such a foray in 1947;15 they will have others to fight, and they may never be able to restore the full effectiveness of the Grazing Service which Senator McCarran — a Senator Stewart come again, and from the same state — all but ruined by the profoundly Stewart-ian tactics of investigating and then cutting the budget.16

Pinchot was the first professional forester in the United States. He admired and respected Muir but on the whole regarded the other man’s mystic effusions as hooey. Instead of individual spiritual enlightenment, Pinchot sought the common material good—“the greatest good, for the greatest number, for the longest run.” Born in 1865 to a wealthy family, he was a shrewd self-promoter, clever with other people’s ideas, who cast himself as an avatar of Science (in fact, he had attended a year of forestry school in France, leaving before his professors thought he was ready). An inauthentic scientist but a visionary as authentic as Muir, he proclaimed that the world’s prosperity depended on sustaining its resources, especially renewable resources like timber, soil, and freshwater. He wanted to protect them not by leaving great swathes of terrain free from human influence but by managing forests and fields with an elite cadre of scientific mandarins. “The first principle of conservation is development,” he said. Development had to be conceived in the long term: “the welfare of this generation and afterwards the welfare of the generations to follow.” He said, “The human race controls the earth it lives upon.

For humans to cause species to become extinct and to destroy the biological diversity of God's creation, for humans to degrade the integrity of the earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the earth of its natural forests, or destroying its wetlands, for humans to contaminate the Earth's waters, its land, its air, and its life with poisonous substances, these are sins.

Franz tipped his wing and looked down on the P-38 he had wounded. It was circling downward, its engine coughing black smoke. Suddenly the hood of its canopy tumbled away in the slipstream. The pilot stood in the cockpit then dove toward the rear of the wing. The draft sucked his body under the forked tail. He free-fell from twelve thousand feet, passing through the clouds. “Pull it!” Franz shouted at the American, urging him to open his chute. When the pilot’s parachute finally popped full of air, Franz felt relief. The pilot drifted lazily downward while his P-38 splashed into the sea. Franz flew lower and saw the P-38 pilot climb into a tiny yellow raft against the whitecaps. Franz radioed Olympus to tell them to relay the American’s position to the Italians. He guessed they were seventy kilometers west of Marettimo and asked if the island could send a boat to pick up the man. For a second, Franz considered hovering over the man in the raft like an aerial beacon to steer a boat to the spot, but he shook the thought from his mind. It would put him at risk. If a prowling flight of enemy fighters found him, Franz knew he, too, could be shot into the sea. Franz and Willi departed the scene, leaving the pilot in his raft to fate. As they flew away, Franz wished the man a strong westerly wind. The American who looked up from the raft was Second Lieutenant Conrad Bentzlin, a young man from a large Swedish-American family in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He was quiet and hardworking, having taught himself English in high school. He had paid his way through the University of Minnesota by working for the government’s Civilian Conservation Corps program, cutting firebreaks in the forests of northern Minnesota. Among his buddies of the 82nd Fighter Group, Bentzlin was known as “the smartest guy in the unit.” Far from shore Bentzlin floated alone. A day later, another flight of P-38s flew over him and, through a hole in the clouds, saw him waving his arms from a raft. But he was in the middle of the sea and they could do nothing. Bentzlin would never be seen again.*

Just before noon one sunny summer’s day, three bears were returning home from their morning wander. They lived in a sturdy wooden cabin, unpretentious and rustic. Approaching the house he’d built with his own paws, Daddy Bear felt a sense of satisfaction. The residence blended in with the forest rather than standing out from it. All the construction materials had been ethically sourced. The wood came from trees felled by storms. A thick layer of turf on the roof provided insulation in winter and kept the cabin cool in summer. In addition to being practical, the turf looked pretty. Its grass sprouted straight up like hair jutting from a mythic head. A little too big to be quaint, yet a little too small to be showoffish, the house was just right. And just right was the way Daddy Bear liked things.

Plant a tree, then another, then many more. Maybe we will be able to cleanse the world.

Due to poaching and global warming, future generations will not be able to see some animal and plant species given the rate at which they are disappearing from the forests and seas. Both vices are man-made and man must be challenged and confronted on these global issues. Park rangers, armies and nature conservation trusts are still grappling to find lasting solutions – will you join them in this fight?

In the mid-twentieth century it became the fashion in library architecture to design buildings as open-floored structures in which furniture, including bookcases, could be moved about at will. The Green/Snead Library of Congress bookstack that six decades earlier had been declared 'perfect' was now viewed as disadvantageously locking a stack arrangement into the configuration of its construction. In the new approach, reinforced concrete floors carry the loads of bookshelves, so that they can be arranged without regard for window placements. This apparently has the appeal of flexibility in the light of indecision, for planners need not look at the functional and aesthetic requirements of their space and its fittings with any degree of finality; they can always change the use of the space as whim and fashion and consultants dictate. It is unfortunate that such has become the case, for it reflects not only a lack of sensitivity to the historical roots of libraries and their use but also rejects the eminently sensible approach to using natural light as a means of energy conservation if nothing else. There is little more pleasing experience in a library than to stand before a bookshelf illuminated not by florescent lights but by the diffused light of the sun. Direct sunlight can be an annoyance and have a downright blinding effect, of course, but it has been the challenge to architects and engineers since Vitruvius to orient their structures--and the bookshelves in them--to minimize such problems in institutional stacks and in private libraries alike. Let us hope that not all future librarians lose their heliotropic instincts nor lose sight of the bookshelves for the forest of bookcases in which they rest.

As the need grows for more research, both Canada and the United States continue to take money away from fire science, forest management, and conservation initiatives to pay for the rising cost of fire.

Onward and upward he pushed until rock, ground, and forest came to an end, until there was nothing but a sharp edge of blunt earth protruding in the late light of the range, where he could see well beyond the park boundaries to national forest land that he had once scouted on foot and horseback. He remembered it then as roadless, the only trails being those hacked by Indians and prospectors. He had taken notes on the flora and fauna, commented on the age of the bristlecone pine trees at the highest elevations, the scrub oak in the valleys, the condors overhead, the trout in alpine tarns. He had lassoed that wild land in ink, returned to Washington, and sent the sketch to the president, who preserved it for posterity. What did Michelangelo feel at the end of his life, staring at a ceiling in the Vatican or a marble figure in Florence? Pinchot knew. And those who followed him, his great-great-grandchildren, Teddy's great-great-grandchildren, people living in a nation one day of five hundred million people, could find their niche as well. Pinchot felt God in his soul, and thanked him, and weariness in his bones. He sensed he had come full circle.

Humanity’s long-term impact on Earth depends both on population and on lifestyle. WWF, a conservation group, has published estimates of the land area, or “footprint,” needed to support each person: it concludes that an area equivalent to “almost three planets” would be required to support the world population with the lifestyle and consumption pattern that it predicts for 2050. This particular calculation is controversial and perhaps somewhat tendentious: for instance, the “footprint” includes the area of forest needed to soak up the carbon dioxide arising from each person’s energy use, making no allowance for a shift to renewable energy sources, nor for the tenable viewpoint that modest rises in carbon dioxide levels are tolerable. Nonetheless, the world plainly could not perpetually support its entire population in the present style of middle-class Europeans and North Americans.

In an article that same year for Sunset magazine, he went so far as to note that in an arid climate such as the Southwest, any grazing at all, even of the most conservative kind, would likely produce erosion. For a high-ranking member of the Forest Service, this amounted to apostasy. To this day, stubborn advocates of public-lands ranching refuse to hear of it.

This litany of loss […] is the profile of a species going extinct. In a generation or two the memory of wild Africa will be lost as utterly as an American prairie of head high wild flowers swirled by bison, darkened by wild pigeons, bordered by towering forests of chestnuts, as it all was mere moments ago.

When humanity wins its battle against the forests, this victory will be humanity's greatest defeat!

Exploitation: early entrants make use of the wealth of opportunity in their environment to multiply. Most fail, not least because they are poorly-connected individuals facing a dangerous world on their own, but some may eventually build a system with potential and connectedness. This is known as the r phase: r has for many years been used as a label for the rate of growth of the population of an ecology (example of phase: young trees).2 2. Conservation: the system persists in its mature form, with the benefit of a complex structure of connections, strong enough now to resist challenges for a long time, but with the weakness that the connections themselves introduce an element of rigidity, slowing down its reactions and reducing its inventiveness. This is the K phase, where the ecology reaches its carrying capacity (example: mature trees).3 In due course, however, the tight connections themselves become a decisive problem, which can only be resolved by . . . The back loop (moving from bottom-right to top-left in the diagram): 3. . . . release: at this point, the cost and complication of maintaining the large scale—providing the resources the system needs, and disposing of its waste—becomes too great. The space and flexibility for local responsiveness had become scarce, the system itself so tightly connected that it locked: a target for predators without and within, against which it found it harder and harder to defend itself. But now the stresses join up, and the system collapses (example: dying trees). This is the omega (Ω) phase, as suggested by Holling and Gunderson, and it is placed by them in its ecological context: The tightly bound accumulation of biomass and nutrients becomes increasingly fragile (overconnected, in systems terms) until it is suddenly released by agents such as forest fires, droughts, insect pests, or intense pulses of grazing.4 4. Reorganisation: the remains of a system after collapse are unpromising material on which to start afresh, and yet they are an opportunity for a different kind of system to enjoy a brief flowering—decomposing the wood of a former forest, recycling the carbon after a fire, restoring the land with forgiving grass, clearing away the assumptions and grandeur of the previous regime. Reorganisation becomes a busy system in its own right (example: rotting trees). This is the alpha (α) phase.5 In this phase, there is a persistent process of disconnecting, with the former subsidiary parts of the system being broken up. But our diagram is drawn on a graph of potential (increasing from bottom to top) and connectedness (increasing from left to right), which allows us to note a curious aspect of this back loop: the defining relationship of the fore loop—where more potential is correlated with more connectedness—is reversed. In the back loop (even) less connectedness goes with more potential. How can this be?

Our lasting legacy lies not in the towering stone structures, but in the forests we nurture, the oceans we safeguard, and the skies we keep pure.

Like the forest, the mountain is an amazing conservation area for paganism and its beliefs.1 It should be recognized that it is the subject of countless myths. Quite often it is the cosmic mountain that connects the human world to that of the gods, revealing hell in its depths and heaven at its peak. It is the dwelling place for countless spirits that take the form of giants, dwarves, fairies, or monstrous animals. The mountain haunts the medieval imagination. Saint Augustine noted in his City of God (IV, 8) that the ridge of the mountains was under the protection of the goddess Collatina.