Gary Snyder:

«Coyote and Ground Squirrel do not break the compact they have with each other that one must play predator and the other play game.» (The Practice of the Wild, 1990. )
«We . . . must try to live without causing unnecessary harm, not just to fellow humans but to all beings. We must try not to be stingy, or to exploit others. There will be enough pain in the world as it is. » ;
«Creatures who have traveled with us through the ages are now apparently doomed, as their habitat - and the old, old habitat of humans - falls before the slow-motion explosion of expanding world economies. » ;
«We need a civilization that can live fully and creatively together with wildness. We must start growing it right here, in the New World.» ;
«Some tiny but critical tracts are held by private nonprofit groups like The Nature Conservancy or the Trust for Public Land. These are the shrines saved from all the land that was once known and lived on by the original people, the little bits left as they were, the last little places where intrinsic nature totally wails, blooms, nests, glints away. They make up only 2 percent of the land of the United States.»;
«The world is our consciousness and it surrounds us.»;
The depths of mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now . . . the bobcat that roams from dream to dream. »;
«The pathless world of wild nature is a surpassing school and those who have lived through her can be tough and funny teachers.» ;
«Why should the peculiarities of human consciousness be the narrow standard by which other creatures are judged? »;
«The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom.»;
«Greed exposes the foolish person or the foolish chicken alike to the ever-watchful hawk of the food-web and to early impermanence. »;
«Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.» ;
«It is clear that the forests must be managed in a way that makes them permanently sustainable.»;
«We ask for slower rotations, genuine streamside protection, fewer roads, no cuts on steep slopes, only occasional shelterwood cuts, and only the most prudent application of the appropriate smaller clear-cut.» ;
«We call for a return to selective logging, and to all-age trees, and to serious heart and mind for the protection of endangered species.»;
«Forests in the tropics are cut to make pasture to raise beef for the American market. Our distance from the source of our food enables us to be superficially more comfortable, and distinctly more ignorant. »;
«Our art is full of animal and plant motifs. All art is full of it. And all story telling and song is full of animals and plants.» (Talking on the Water, 1994.) ;
«Nature literacy is being tuned to the weather and to birds and animals. It's having a sense of what your particular climatic type is. It's knowing what river you're living on and where your drinking water comes from.»;
«You see things differently by actively studying plants , flowers, weather , birds , over a long period.»;
«There's a big, old live oak down in one end of the meadow I have walked by hundreds of times. I knew what it was&emdash;an interior live oak. I've crawled under it on several occasions. It was no mystery to me. But one day last spring, I stopped and took a look at it, and I really saw it. In a sense, it showed itself to me. No woo-woo about it . . . In India, this is called darshan. »;
«The natural world is a community I want to be a part of, because I have more respect for myself when I'm engaged with it.»;
«It's good to understand that the range of the world itself has made things happen, that there would be no orcas without seals, no seals without salmon, and no salmon without little pink plankton.»