“[T]he people of plenty were a people of waste.”
Source: Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
“Born of antimodern sentiment, the summer camp was ultimately a modern phenomenon, a "therapeutic space" as much dependent on the city, the factory, and "progress" to define its parameters as on that intangible but much lauded entity called nature. In short, the summer camp should best be read not as a simple rejection of modern life, but, rather, as one of the complex negotiations of modernity taking place in mid-twentieth century Canada.”
Source: The Nurture of Nature: Childhood, Antimodernism, and Ontario Summer Camps, 1920-55
“Nothing can ever fix nature' not even all monies in the world and money rules, are never worthy following.”
“To be intimidated by the world (Psalm 2) is as spiritually fatal as being overly attracted to it (Psalm 1).”
Source: The Songs of Jesus: A Year of Daily Devotions in the Psalms
“In fact, the advocates of People's Park had asserted another version of what is probably America's oldest and most cherished fantasy: a daily reality of harmony between man and nature based on an experience of the land land as essentially feminine - that is not simply the land as mother, but the land as woman, the total female principle of gratification - enclosing the individual in an environment of receptivity, repose, and painless and integral satisfaction.”
Source: Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters
“A dam tears at all the interconnected webs of river valley life.”
Source: Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams
“During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a practical knowledge of the construction of small lakes was part of the equipment of most countrymen. Many of the holes they dug and dams they built still hold water and are now often regarded as 'natural.' They are of immeasurable value in the landscape.”
Source: Designed for recreation: A practical handbook for all concerned with providing leisure facilities in the countryside;
“Underlying many aspects of water development is a myth: the myth that we must have more.”
Source: Endangered Rivers and the Conservation Movement
“In the 1940s dams were synonymous with progress, and the rivers were to be conquered with the fervour of a pioneer wielding an axe.”
Source: Endangered Rivers and the Conservation Movement
“By what peculiar twist of perception, I wondered, had I managed to see the plowed fields and second-growth forests of southern Wisconsin—a landscape of former prairies now long vanished—as somehow more “natural” than the streets, buildings, and parks of Chicago? All represented drastic human alterations of earlier landscapes.”
Source: Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West