Some Earth Day words to live by

Earth Day (today) always reminds me of some favorite conservation quotations. Here are some powerful words to live by that guide my life and thinking:

“The long fight to save wild beauty represents democracy at its best. It requires citizens to practice the hardest of virtues – self-restraint.”

Edwin Way Teale

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtfully committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Margaret Mead

“In wildness is the preservation of the world.”

Henry David Thoreau

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

Aldo Leopold

“What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts soon happens to the man. All things are connected.”

Chief Seattle

“The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.”

Rachel Carson

“Only in the last moment of human history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world.”

E.O. Wilson

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

Martin Luther King Jr.

“We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the Earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.”

Wallace Stegner

“I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use our natural resources, but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or rob by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.”

Theodore Roosevelt

“A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children.”

John James Audubon

“In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments – there are consequences.”

Robert Ingersoll

“We all look to nature too much, and live with her too little.”

Oscar Wilde

“The purpose of conservation: the greatest good to the greatest number of people for the longest time.”

Gifford Pinchot

“To keep every cog and every wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

Aldo Leopold

“Arresting global population growth should be second in importance only to avoiding nuclear war on humanity’s agenda.”

Paul and Anne Ehrlich

“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”

Ansel Adams

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.”

Gandhi

“Taking time to be awed by the earth that supports us, the other species that share it with us, and how we all tick is good for the soul and a religious experience.”

Roland Roth

“I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.”

Andy Warhol

“In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we are taught.”

Baba Dioum

“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality and so on – and have found that none of these finally satisfies ... what remains? Nature remains.”

Walt Whitman

Dr. Shalaway can be heard on Birds & Nature from 3 to 4 p.m. Sunday afternoons on 620 KHB Radio (Pittsburgh) or live online at www.khbradio.com. Visit his website, www.drshalawaycom, or contact him directly at sshalaway@aol.com or 2222 Fish Ridge Road, Cameron, WV 26033.