What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
--
Inversnaid, lines 13-16Gerard Manley Hopkins
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I like that saying of Thoreau’s that “in wildness is the preservation of the world.” Settlers on this continent from the beginning have been seeking that wilderness and its wildness. The explorers and pioneers were out on the edge, seeking that wildness because they could sense that in Europe everything had become locked tight with things. The things were owned by all the same people and all of the roads went in the same direction forever. When we got here there was a sense of possibility and new direction, and it had to do with wildness.
Ken Kesey
To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs. A roadless marsh is seemingly as worthless to the alphabetical conservationist as an undrained one was to the empire-builders. Solitude, the one natural resource still undowered of alphabets, is so far recognized as valuable only by ornithologists and cranes.
Thus always does history, whether or marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.Aldo Leopold
In God's wildness lies the hope of the world — the great fresh, unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware.
John Muir
The sheer magnificence and vastness of the coastal environment — an epitome of the true wilderness of the world — stood as a reminder that all human life is a mere flicker within something unimaginably greater. Jeffer's western wilderness was a key to perceiving the essential wildness of the universe as a whole, in which human personality is only something like a lichen on a rock. No tall heroics for Jeffers.
Robinson Jeffers
In wildness is the preservation of the world.
Henry David Thoreau
Hopkins, Gerard Manley
Hopkins, Harry
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