Behold, to the LORD your God belong heaven and the highest heavens, the earth and all that is in it.

-Deuteronomy 10:14,
the New American Standard Version of the Bible  

Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.

-John Ruskin (1819-1900)  

What have they done to the earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered,
And ripped her and bit her,
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn,
And tied her with fences and dragged her down.

-Jim Morrison (1943-1971) of The Doors,
"When the Music's Over," 1967  

Nature is the time-vesture of God that reveals Him to the wise, and hides him from the foolish.

-Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), cited in 
Henry Larkin's Carlyle and the Open Secret of His Life, 1886  

Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man. 

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)  

What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of science is not able to make an oyster?

-Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667)

Come forth into the light of things, 
Let Nature be your teacher.

-William Wordsworth (1770-1850), The Tables Turned, 1798

...there is nothing that has been created without some reason, even if human nature is incapable of knowing precisely the reason for them all.

-John Chrysostom (354?-407), Archbishop of Constantinople
Homilies on Genesis 7.14  

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.

-Aristotle (B.C. 384–322)  

How endless is that volume which God hath written of the world! Every creature is a letter, every day a new page.

-Joseph Hall (1574–1656)

We talked of the beauty of the world of God's and of the great mystery of it. Every blade of grass, every insect, ant, and golden bee, all so amazingly know their path, though they have not intelligence, they bear witness to the mystery of God and continually accomplish it themselves.

-Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)  

Because God created the Natural – invented it out of His love and artistry – it demands our reverence.

-C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), God in the Dock, 1948  

In the created world around us we see the Eternal Artist, Eternal Love at work.

-Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941)

Any error about creation also leads to an error about God.

-Thomas Aquinas (1225?-1274)

The First Law of Ecology: Everything Is Connected To Everything Else

-Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle, 1971

Brothers and sisters, love the earth. Be true to the earth, and do not believe those seducers who look longingly to the world beyond, casting suspicion on this world. Jesus is the greatest friend of the earth –Jesus who again and again, in the original spirit of Judaism, proclaimed love for the soil and love for the land. "Blessed are the peacemakers," he said, "for they shall possess the earth.

-Eberhard Arnold (1883-1935), Salt and Light, 2002

It seems clear at last that our love for the natural world—Nature—is the only means by which we can requite God's obvious love for it.

-Edward Abbey (1927-1989)  

The course of Nature is the art of God.

-Edward Young (1683-1765)  

Nature is the art of God.

-Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), Religio Medici, Part 1, section XVI  

There’s not a plant or flower below but makes Thy glories known,
And clouds arise, and tempests blow by order from Thy throne;
While all that borrows life from Thee is ever in Thy care;
And everywhere that we can be, Thou, God art present there.

-Isaac Watts (1674-1748), Divine and Moral Songs for Children, 1715

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

-Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

From joy springs all creation.
By joy it is sustained,
Towards joy it proceeds,
And unto joy it returns.

-The Taittiriya Upanisad (600 B.C.)  

All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.

-Marie Curie (1867-1934)  

Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, 'I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway.'

-Maya Angelou  

Natural objects themselves, even when they make no claim to beauty, excite the feelings, and occupy the imagination. Nature pleases, attracts, delights, merely because it is nature. We recognize in it an Infinite Power.

-Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835)  

God means us to delight in his world. It isn't necessary to know botany or zoology or biology in order to enjoy the manifold life of nature. Just observe. And remember. And compare. And be always looking to God with thankfulness and worship for having placed you in such a delightful corner of the universe as the planet Earth.

-Jesse Brand, Letter to his son, Paul Brand,
quoted in Phillip Yancey's Soul Survivor, 2001  

I say if your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life.

-Calvin from Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes  

Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.

-Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959)  

It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.

-Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), De Profundis, 1905 

We need the tonic of wildness, to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only the wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.  At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.  We can never have enough of nature.  We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

-Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden, 1854

Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and through her, God.

-Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Nature doth thus kindly heal every wound.  By the mediation of a thousand little mosses and fungi, the most unsightly objects become radiant of beauty.  There seem to be two sides of this world, presented us at different times, as we see things in growth or dissolution, in life or death.  And seen with the eye of the poet, as God sees them, all things are alive and beautiful.

-Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Journal, 1845

The beauty of the world is Christ's tender smile for us coming through matter.

-Simone Weil (1909-1943)  

The life, beauty and meaning of the whole created order, from the tomtit to the Milky Way, refers back to the Absolute Life and Beauty of its Creator: and so lived, every bit has spiritual significance.

-Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), The Spiritual Life, 1937  

The sky and the earth and the waters and the things that are in them, the fishes, and the birds and the trees are not evil. All these are good; it is evil men who make this evil world.

-Augustine (354-430), Sermones and Populum  

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.

-Alexander Pope (1688-1744)  

Ultimately, the human being is in the mercy of nature.

-The 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso
quoted in Peter Swanson's Water: The Drop of Life, 2001  

Love every leaf, every ray of light.
Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing.
Loving all, you will perceive the mystery of God in all.

-Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevski (1821–1881)  

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

-Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)  

Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.

-Gore Vidal, “Gods and Greens,” in London Observer, 27 Aug. 1989
reprinted in A View from the Diner’s Club, 1991

That the sky is brighter than the earth means little unless the earth itself is appreciated and enjoyed.

-Helen Keller (1880-1968)  

What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living
Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature,
Awhile upon her beauty,
And hand her torch of gladness to the ages
    Following after?

-George Santayana (1863-1952), "Ode" *  

What I see in nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of 'humility.' This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.

-Albert Einstein (1879-1955) quoted in "The Other Einstein"
by Timothy Ferris in Science 84, Oct '83  

I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself what a wonderful world.
I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself what a wonderful world.

-Louis Armstrong (1901-1970), "What a Wonderful World"  

Nature has poured forth all things for the common use of all men. And God has ordained that all things should be produced that there might be food in common for all, and that the earth should be in the common possession of all. Nature created common rights, but usurpation has transformed them into private rights.

-Ambrose (339-397), Bishop of Milan, On the Duties of the Clergy *  

Both the left, with its endless talk of rights, and the right, with its disdain for government oversight, suggest that you can do what you please. Americans have taken the message to heart, and nowhere is that clearer than in the mess we've made of the natural environment. How many times do we have to watch homes cantilevered over canyons surrender to a river of mud or beach houses on stilts slide into the surf to know that when we do high-stakes battle with Mother Nature, Mother takes all? Once I heard a businessman at a zoning-board meeting say, "Well, a person can do what he wants with his land." Actually, that's not true; that's why zoning exists. Is any city, town or state brave enough to just say no to waterfront development that destroys dunes, despoils water and creates the conditions that will, when a storm strikes, create destruction?

-Anna Quindlen, “It's about changing the way we all live now,” 
Newsweek, 19 Sep 05

None may wholly escape the good of Nature, however imperfectly exposed to her blessings. The minister will not preach a perfectly flat and sedimentary sermon after climbing a snowy peak; and the fair play and tremendous impartiality of Nature, so tellingly displayed, will surely affect the after pleadings of the lawyer. Fresh air at least will get into everybody, and the cares of mere business will be quenched like the fires of a sinking ship.

-John Muir (1838-1914), Steep Trails, 1918  

You shall find books and sermons everywhere, in the land and in the sea, in the earth and in the skies, and you shall learn from every living beast, and bird, and fish, and insect, and from every useful or useless plant that springs from the ground.

-Charles H. Spurgeon (1834-1892),
First published sermon, "Harvest Time"

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

-John Muir (1838-1914)

How often are the beauties of nature unheeded by man, who, musing on past ills, brooding over the possible calamities of the future, building castles in the air, or wrapped up in his own self-love and self-importance, forgets to look abroad, or looks with a vacant stare.

-Almira Lincoln Phelps (1793-1884), "The Child and Nature,"
The Mother's Journal, 1838  

Nature's law affirm instead of prohibit. If you violate her laws, you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman.

-Luther Burbank (1849-1926)  

Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.

-Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959)  

We have to take care about nature as much as nature is taking care about us. Nature is very kind with us. And if you want to enjoy the gifts of nature and the promises of nature, we have to defer to nature and its needs, its rules, its norms.

-Shimon Peres quoted in Peter Swanson's Water: The Drop of Life, 2001  

On our crowded planet there are no longer any internal affairs!

-Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Nobel-prizewinning novelist  

What good is a house, if you haven't got a decent planet to put it on?

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)  

A wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and that the consequence is an inevitable doom. For a long enough time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet.

-T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Christianity and Culture, 1939 *  

In what belongs to the deeper meanings of nature and her mediation between us and God, the appearances of nature are the truths of nature, far deeper than any scientific discoveries in and concerning them. The show of things is that for which God cares most, for their show is the face of far deeper things than they… The body of man does not exist for the sake of its hidden secrets; its hidden secrets exist for the sake of its outside—for the face and the form in which dwells revelation: its outside is the deepest of it. So nature as well exists primarily for her face, her look, her appeals to the heart and the imagination, her simple service to human need, and not for the secrets to be discovered in her and turned to man's further use.

-George Macdonald (1824-1905),
"The Voice of Job," Unspoken Sermons  

All that is sweet, delightful, and amiable in this world, in the serenity of the air, the fineness of seasons, the joy of light, the melody of sounds, the beauty of colors, the fragrancy of smells, the splendor of precious stones, is nothing else but Heaven breaking through the veil of this world, manifesting itself in such a degree and darting forth in such variety so much of its own nature.

-William Law (1686-1761)  

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere: the dew is never all dried at once: a shower is forever falling, vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

-John Muir (1838-1914)
{contributed by Joe Keyser, Montgomery County, Maryland,
Department of Environmental Protection}  

Happy the man whose lot it is to know
The secrets of the earth. He hastens not
To work his fellows hurt by unjust deeds,
But with rapt admiration contemplates
Immortal Nature's ageless harmony,
And how and when the order came to be.

-Euripides (480-405 B.C.)  

As scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved with nature and has lost his emotional "unconscious identity" with natural phenomena.

-Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), Man and His Symbols, 1964  

We should understand well that all things are the work of the Great Spirit. We should know the Great Spirit is within all things: the trees, the grasses, the rivers, the mountains, and the four-legged and winged peoples; and even more important, we should understand that the Great Spirit is also above all these things and peoples. When we do understand all this deeply in our hearts, then we will fear, and love, and know the Great Spirit, and then we will be and act and live as the Spirit intends.

-Black Elk a.k.a. Ekhaka Sapa (1863-1950)  

In order that we finite beings may apprehend the Emporer He translates His glory into multiple forms – into stars, woods, waters, beasts, and the bodies of men.

-C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), Taliessen Through Logres, 1948  

Far from thy mad fantastic ways
I have here found a resting-place
    Of poor wayfaring men:
Calm as the hermit in his grot
I here enjoy my happy lot,
    And solid pleasures gain.

Along the hill or dewy mead
In sweet forgetfulness I tread,
    Or wander through the grove;
As Adam in his native seat,
In all his works my God I meet,
    The object of my love.

I see his beauty in the flower:
To shade my walks and deck my bower
    His love and wisdom join;
Him in the feathered choir I hear,
And own, while all my soul is ear,
    The music is divine.

-Charles Wesley (1707-1788), "For One Retired Into the Country"  

For Nature beats in perfect tune,
And rounds with rhyme her every rune,
Whether she work in land or sea,
Or hide underground her alchemy.
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Poems, Woodnotes 1847  

The miracle of our Lord, Jesus Christ, by which He made wine from water is certainly no wonder for those who know that God did it. For He, the very one who every year does this on vines, made wine on that day at the wedding in those six water jars, which he ordered to be filled with water. For just as what the attendants put into the water jars was turned into wine by the Lord's effort so also what the clouds pour down is turned into wine by the effort of the same Lord. But that does not amaze us because it happens every year; by its regularity it has lost its wonderment. Yet it merits even greater reflection than that which was done in the water jars. For who reflects upon the works of God, by which this whole world is governed and managed, and is not struck dumb and overwhelmed by miracles?

-Augustine (354-430), Tractates on the Gospel of St. John 8:1  

We do not ask what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens... The diversity of the phenomena of Nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.

-Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Mysterium Cosmographicum 1596  

It were happy if we studied nature more in natural things, and acted according to nature, whose rules are few, plain, and most reasonable.

-William Penn (1644-1718), Some Fruits of Solitude, 1693  

The laws of nature are written deep in the folds and faults of the earth. By encouraging men to learn those laws one can lead them further to a knowledge of the author of all laws.

-John J.Lynch SJ on becoming president of NY Academy of Sciences,
New York Times 5 Dec 63  

The earth is at the same time mother,
She is mother of all that is natural,
mother of all that is human.
She is mother of all,
for contained in her
are the seeds of all.
The earth of human kind
contains all moistness,
all verdancy,
all germinating power.
It is in so many ways fruitful.
All creation comes from it.
Yet it forms
not only the basic raw material
for humankind,
but also the substance
of the incarnation
of God's son.

-Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179),
from Meditations with Hildegard of Bingen, Gabriele Uhlein, 1983  

Nature is not our mother; Nature is our sister.

-G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), Orthodoxy, 1908  

The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, "charm," "spell," "enchantment." They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.

-G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), Orthodoxy, 1908

The Bible makes clear a basic truth that we self-centered humans find difficult to accept, namely, that the natural universe was not created primarily for us. There is no doubt that God wants us to enjoy it and even use its resources to optimize a good life for ourselves. But the ultimate purpose of creation is worship. Nature and all living things were created to glorify God.

-Tony Campolo, Carpe Diem, 1994  

I learned that God reveals himself through Scripture and in general through his creation, and when we destroy God’s creation, it’s similar to ripping pages from the Bible

-Jonathan Merritt,
spokesman for the Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative,
cited in “Southern Baptists Back a Shift on Climate Change,”
New York Times, 10 Mar 08

Man, do you think yours is the only soul?
Look around you. Everything that you see
quivers with being. Though your thoughts are free,
one thing you do not think about: the whole.

Beasts have a mind; respect it. Flowers too—
look at one. Nature brought forth each petal.
There is a mystery that sleeps in metal.
Everything feels, and has power over you.

-Gérard Labrunie, a.k.a Gérard de Nerval (1808-1885)  

The world exists, not for what it means but for what it is. The purpose of mushrooms is to be mushrooms, wine is in order to be wine: things are precious before they are contributory. It is a false piety that walks through creation looking only for lessons which can be applied somewhere else. To be sure, God remains the greatest good; but, for all that, the world is still good in itself. Indeed, since He does not need it, its whole reason for being must lie in its own natural goodness; He has no use for it, only delight.

-Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, 1969  

This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient, more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.

-Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)  

Right after Moses had delivered the Ten Commandments, he received instructions to build an altar of unhewn stone "for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it." This scripture must mean that we are able to be more mindful of the creation, more mindful of the original materials of the universe than of the artist. The altar was to stand as a reminder that we could not improve on the timeless purpose of the original material. I don't think such a scripture means we are never to shape the earth with our art or science, but that the scientist and the artist must remain subordinate to the larger Creation. The chances of disrupting nature's patterns, upon which we are dependent, are greatly reduced if we assume this modest posture.

-Wes Jackson, Altars of Unhewn Stone, 1987  

Every now and again take a good look at something not made with hands -- a mountain, a star, the turn of a stream. There will come to you wisdom and patience and solace and, above all, the assurance that you are not alone in the world.

-Sydney Lovett (1890-1979), College Pastor at Yale (1933-1958)

Topographically the country is magnificent—and terrifying. Why terrifying? Because nowhere else in the world is the divorce between man and nature so complete. Nowhere have I encountered such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as here in America. Here boredom reaches its peak.

-Henry Miller (1891–1980), preface,
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, 1945

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

-Albert Einstein (1879-1955)  

Understanding the ecosphere comes hard because, to the modern mind, it is a curiously foreign place. We have become accustomed to think of separate, singular events, each dependent upon a unique, singular cause. But in the ecosphere every effect is also a cause: an animal’s waste becomes food for soil bacteria; what bacteria excretes nourishes plants; animals eat the plants. Such ecological cycles are hard to fit into human experience in the age of technology, where machine A always yields product B, and product B, once used, is cast away, having no further meaning for the machine, the product, or the user.

-Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle, 1971

Cities are expanding at an alarming rate. Inter-tidal zones are being polluted as mangroves gives way to marina. Over-consumption is leading to soil erosion and desertification, which in turn cause famine and exert pressure on formally fertile areas. We are pulling out the plugs of the system that keeps us alive. Every indicator is showing red: species diversity, water quality, weather patterns, the number of refugees... We are unravelling nature like an old jumper.

-Penny Kemp and Derek Wall, A Green Manifesto for the 1990s, 1990  

We are altering the most basic forces of the planet's surface - the content of the sunlight, the temperature and aridity - and that brings out the most powerful questions about who is in charge. If you wanted to give a name to this theological problem, I think you could say that we are engaged in decreation.

-Bill McKibben, Christianity Today, December '96  

The good news may be that Nature is phasing out the white man, but the bad news is that’s who She thinks we all are.

-Alice Walker, “Nuclear Madness: What You Can Do,” 
Black Scholar, Spring 1982

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
  And all is smeared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
  And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
  There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
  Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
  World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), God's Grandeur  

Americans long thought that nature could take care of itself—or that is it did not, the consequences were someone else's problem. As we know now, that assumption was wrong; none of us is a stranger to environmental problems.

-Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States,
Message to the Congress, 23 May 77  

The natural beauty that you and I enjoy today is a sacred trust. So, we must do more than simply limit the damage we've already done. We must work to preserve and restore the integrity and richness of this continent's natural splendor.

-George Bush, 41st President of the United States,
Speech at Virginia State Fairgrounds, Richmond, 21 Jun 89  

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

-Lord Byron (1788-1824), "Solitude," Childe Harold's Pilgrimage  

We are not talking about esthetics. We are talking about life: survival of Man. We must train young people to get another vision of Nature. We call it 'wilderness,' and we think it is progress to get further and further away from it. How crazy! Where would we have been if Nature had not built us up?

-Thor Heyerdahl, speech to the annual conference of United World Colleges
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, 13 Mar 00  

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, overcivilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity.

-John Muir (1838-1914)  

We do not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams...as "wild." Only to white man was nature a "wilderness."

-Luther Standing Bear, Oglala Chief,
quoted in National Geographic Nov 98  

The great wilds of our country, once held to be boundless and inexhaustible, are being rapidly invaded and overrun in every direction, and everything destructible in them is being destroyed. How far destruction may go it is not easy to guess. Every landscape, low and high, seems doomed to be trampled and harried. Even the sky is not safe from scath--blurred and blackened whole summers together with the smoke of fires that devour the woods.

-John Muir (1838-1914), Steep Trails, 1918  

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity.

-Wallace Stegner (1909-1993),
quoted in National Geographic Nov 98  

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 clean air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment. We need wilderness preserved-- as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds-- because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.

-Wallace Stegner (1909-1993), Coda: Wilderness Letter, 1960  

Christ wears "two shoes" in the world: scripture and nature. Both are necessary to understand the Lord, and at no stage can creation be seen as a separation of things from God.

-John Scotus Eriugena (810-877)  

I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.

-George Washington Carver (1864-1943)  

God has, in fact, written two books, not just one. Of course, we all are familiar with the first book he wrote, namely Scripture. But he has written a second book called creation.

-Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)  

Earth is crammed with Heaven.
And every bush aflame with God.
But only those who see take off their shoes--
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), Aurora Leigh, Book viii, 1857  

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

-Alice Walker, The Color Purple, 1983

In our own beginnings, we are formed out of the body's interior landscape. For a short while, our mothers' bodies are the boundaries and personal geography which are all that we know of the world…. Once we no longer live beneath our mother's heart, it is the earth with which we form the same dependent relationship, relying … on its cycles and elements, helpless without its protective embrace.

-Louise Erdrich, New York Times 28 Jul 85  

Although birds coexist with us on this eroded planet, they live independently of us with a self-sufficiency that is almost a rebuke. In the world of birds a symposium on the purpose of life would be inconceivable. They do not need it. We are not that self reliant. We are the ones who have lost our way.

-Brooks Atkinson (1894-1984)  

I am often asked if I am not lonely on my solitary excursions. It seems so self-evident that one cannot be lonesome where everything is wild and beautiful and busy and steeped with God that the question is hard to answer.

-John Muir (1838-1914)  

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.

-Anne Frank (1829-1945), Diary  

To sit long in one posture, pouring over a book, or driving a quill, is in itself a taxing of nature; but add to this a badly ventilated chamber, a body which has long been without muscular exercise, and a heart burdened with many cares, and we have all the elements for preparing a seething cauldron of despair, especially in the dim months of fog ... Nature outside his window is calling him to health and beckoning him to joy. He who forgets the humming of the bees among the heather, the cooing of the wood-pigeons in the forest, the song of the birds in the woods, the rippling of rills among the rushes, and the sighing of the wind among the pines, needs not wonder if his heart forgets to sing and his soul grows heavy.

-Charles H. Spurgeon (1834-1892), Lectures to My Students, 1990  

Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur is the cradle of thought and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without.

-John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)  

I am in love with this world. It has been my home. It has been my point of outlook into the universe. I have never bruised myself against it nor tried to use it ignobly.

-John Burroughs (1837-1921)  

If humans are to fully attain their destinies, so far as earthly development permits this; if they are to become truly whole, unbroken units, they must feel and know themselves to be one, not only with God and humanity, but also with nature.

-Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel (1782-1852)

People who minister worldwide to protect and conserve the environment are of no lower status than those who minister to plant churches.

-Leonard Sweet, SoulTsunami, 1999

A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, power lines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need refuge even though we may never need to go there. I may never in my life get to Alaska… but I am grateful that it's there. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.

-Edward Abbey (1927-1989),
Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, 1971  

The earth does not argue,
Is not pathetic, has no arrangements,
Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise,
Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures,
Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out.

-Walt Whitman (1819-1892), To the sayer of words  

The earth is all the home I have,
the heavens my wide roof-tree

-W.E. Aytoun (1813-1865), The Wandering Jew  

Earth's the right place for love
I don't know where it's likely to get better.

-Robert Frost (1874-1963) Birches  

God gives all men all earth to love,
But since man's heart is small,
Ordains for each one spot shall prove
Beloved over all.

-Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), Sussex  

The poetry of earth is never dead
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide I cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead.

-John Keats (1795-1821), On the Grasshopper and Cricket  

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
that will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

-T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) East Coker

Every intervention of man in the environment around him incurs some risk as to both favorable and unfavorable consequences. Every intervention is taken in the face of partial ignorance as to what its effects will be and involves uncertainty as to the ultimate outcome.

- Gilbert F. White, "The Meaning of the Environmental Crisis," 1970 
Geography, Resources, and Environment: Selected Writings of Gilbert F. White, 
Volume 1, 1986

The gap between the rich and poor is growing among and within most nations. The political and social effects of unequal location of energy and other mineral resources are acute. Population numbers continue to climb. The global environment shows signs of widespread deterioration. Both natural and social environments are increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic disturbances… There may, however, be a cheering challenge in the possibility that out of its struggle with these realities the human race may move a bit nearer to behaving as if it were indeed one family.

- Gilbert F. White, "Stewardship of the Earth" 
Geography, Resources, and Environment: Selected Writings of Gilbert F. White, 
Volume 1 1986

Our assaults on the ecosystem are so powerful, so numerous, so finely interconnected, that although the damage they do is clear, it is very difficult to discover how it was done. By which weapon? In whose hand? Are we driving the ecosphere to destruction simply by our growing numbers? By our greedy accumulation of wealth? Or are the machines which we have built to gain this wealth—the magnificent technology that now feeds us out of neat packages, that clothes us in man-made fibers, that surrounds us with new chemical creations—at fault?

-Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle, 1971

The environmental crisis is somber evidence of an insidious fraud hidden in the vaunted productivity and wealth of modern, technology-based society. This wealth has been gained by rapid short-term exploitation of the environmental system, but it has blindly accumulated a debt to nature—a debt so large and so pervasive that in the next generation it may, if unpaid, wipe out most of the wealth it has gained us.

-Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle, 1971

The ethics of self-interest and human mania for power are out of control. Humankind destroys the weakest and the impoverished in human societies and is fast moving beyond genocide to ecocide. The destruction of the environment is the ultimate destruction that shuts the open door of the future, with all of its possibilities and potential. What is needed in our postmodern world is to change the price tags we have placed on creation. New price tags will indicate that human beings, animals and the environment are precious because they are created by God; they are sacred. Their sacredness does not require that we become pantheists who worship creation and its creatures as gods; their sacredness does require that all creation be respected, and that it not be exploited to bring money and wealth to any powerful interest group. God, the Creator, who is holy, gave the creation this sacred quality as a divine expression of love and grace. Therefore, the prayer "Hallowed be your name" is a plea for the sanctifying presence of God. It serves as a reminder to humans, who have drained creation of its integrity.

-J. Alfred Smith, Sr.,
Pastor of the Allen Temple Baptist Church of Oakland  

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

-the Apostle Paul (c.A.D. 5-67) from his Letter to the Colossians 1:15-17
the New International Version of the Bible  

What beauty for contemplation and what bounties for use God has scattered like largesse for man amid the weariness and miseries of his fallen and penalized lot! What words can describe the myriad beauties of land and sea and sky? Just think of the illimitable abundance and the marvelous loveliness of light, or of the beauty of the sun and moon and stars, of shadowy glades in the woods and of the color and perfume of flowers, of the songs and plumage of so many varieties of birds, of the innumerable animals of every species that amaze us most when they are smallest in size. For example, the activity of ants and bees seems more stupendous than the sheer immensity of whales. Or take a look at the grandiose spectacle of the open sea, clothing and reclothing itself dresses of changing shades of green, purple and blue.

-Augustine of Hippo (354-430), The City of God 22:24  

Our air, water, soil, forests, oceans, rivers, lakes, scenic beauty, wildlife habitat, minerals, that is the wealth of the country.

-Gaylord Nelson (1916-2005)

Earth, thou great footstool of our God, who reigns on high; thou fruitful source of all our raiment, life, and food; our house, our parent, and our nurse.

-Isaac Watts (1674-1748)  

On Spaceship Earth there are no passengers; everybody is a member of the crew. We have moved into an age in which everybody's activities affect everybody else.

-Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), Understanding Media, 1964  

The supreme reality of our time is ...the vulnerability of our planet.

-John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35^th U.S. President,
Speech 28 Jun 63

From the creation learn to admire thy Lord! And if any of the things thou see exceed thy comprehension, and thou are not able to find the reason thereof, yet for this glorify the Creator, that the wisdom of these works surpass thine understanding.

-John Chrysostom (354?-407), Archbishop of Constantinople
On the Statues 12:7  

It is through our technology that we have been able to fly far away from earth to learn, in truth, how precious it is. It is no coincidence that our awakening to the special nature of our world and to its uniquely balanced environment and its limitations coincided with our first glimpse of earth from outer space, through the eyes of astronauts, television cameras and photographic equipment.

-Dixy Lee Ray, former governor of Washington State
Trashing the Planet, 1990  

Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life.

-Elizabeth Goudge (1900-1984)  

The ecological crisis is a moral issue.

-Pope John Paul II, The Ecological Crisis: A Common Responsibility, 1990  

The environmental crisis is a sign that the ecosphere is now so heavily strained that its continued stability is threatened. It is a warning that we must discover the source of this suicidal drive and master it before it destroys the environment—and ourselves.

-Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle, 1971  

The environmental crisis is an outward manifestation of a crisis of mind and spirit. There could be no greater misconception of its meaning than to believe that it is concerned only with endangered wildlife, human-made ugliness, and pollution. These are part of it, but more importantly, the crisis is concerned with the kind of creatures we are and what we must become in order to survive.

-Lynton K. Caldwell  

Love the earth and sun and animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others…and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency

-Walt Whitman (1819-1892), Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855  

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.

-Edward Abbey (1927-1989)  

If it were not for the outside world, we would have no inside world to understand things by. Least of all could we understand God without these millions of sights and sounds and scents and motions, weaving their endless harmonies. They come out of His heart to let us know a little of what is in it.

-George MacDonald (1824-1905), 
The Highlander's Last Song, 1986 

... if a dead man is raised to life, all men spring up in astonishment. Yet every day one that had no being is born, and no man wonders, though it is plain to all, without doubt, that it is a greater thing for that to be created which was without being than for that which had being to be restored. Because the dry rod of Aaron budded, all men were in astonishment; every day a tree is produced from the dry earth, ... and no man wonders ...Five thousand men were filled with five loaves; ... every day the grains of seed that are sown are multiplied in a fullness of ears, and no man wonders. All ... wondered to see water once turned into wine. Every day the earth's moisture, being drawn into the root of the vine, is turned by the grape into wine, and no man wonders. Full of wonder then are all the things which men never think to wonder at, because ... they are by habit become dull to the consideration of them.

-Gregory the Great, (540–604)
Pope of the Roman Catholic Church 590–604  

This is my Father's world, and to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres.
This is my Father's world: I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas - His hand the wonders wrought.

This is my Father's world, the birds their carols raise,
The morning light, the lily white, declare their Maker's praise.
This is my Father's world: He shines in all that's fair;
In the rustling grass I hear Him pass, He speaks to me everywhere.

This is my Father's world, O let me ne'er forget
That though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the Ruler yet.
This is my Father's world: the battle is not done;
Jesus who died shall be satisfied, and earth and heav'n be one.

-Maltbie D. Babock (1858-1901)
from the hymn "This Is My Father's World"  

The environment makes up a huge, enormously complex living machine that forms a thin dynamic layer on the earth's surface, and every human activity depends on the integrity and the proper functioning of this machine. Without the photosynthetic activity of green plants, there would be no oxygen for our engines, smelters, and furnaces, let alone support for human and animal life. Without the action of the plants, animals, and microorganisms that live in them, we could have no pure water in our lakes and rivers. Without the biological processes that have gone on in the soil for thousands of years, we could have neither food crops, oil, nor coal. This machine is our biological capital, the basic apparatus on which our total productivity depends. If we destroy it, our most advanced technology will become useless and any economic and political system that depends on it will founder. The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.

-Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle, 1971  

Heaven and earth are threads of one loom.

-an anonymous Shaker quoted by June Sprigg in By Shaker Hands  

To live we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this lovingly, knowingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it greedily, clumsily, ignorantly, destructively, it is a desecration. By such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.

-Wendell Berry quoted in Sierra Nov-Dec 1979 *  

It is only logical that the pauperization of our soul and the soul of society coincide with the pauperization of the environment. One is the cause and the reflection of the other.

-Paolo Soleri
quoted in The Soul, An Archeology edited by Claudia Setzer  

The earth should not be injured.
The earth should not be destroyed.
As often as the elements,
the elements of the world are violated
by ill treatment,
so God will cleanse them thru the sufferings,
thru the hardships of mankind.