Mark Kenyon > Quotes

“I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in,” he said. “Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot,” said Leopold. “Like winds and sunset, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“Far from the luxuries of home, camp life forces a slower, more thoughtful approach to living. Mornings are savored. Coffee is sipped rather than drained. Making meals is less a chore and more an event. An evening stroll replaces the nightly TV hypnosis. In short, for a few fleeting days, we are briefly, blissfully, beautifully human again.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“Ed Abbey, the chief wilderness sage of his day, reminded us that “the indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you, as one of the great sights which every American, if he can travel at all, should see.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“The object is not to preserve the forests because they are beautiful, though that is good in itself, nor because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the wilderness, though that, too, is good in itself,” said Roosevelt. “But the primary object of our forest policy, as of the land policy of the United States, is the making of a prosperous home.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“As much as I love hiking and hunting and fishing and camping, I might love the meals that follow just as much. The post-adventure meal is akin to a religious experience. It just cannot be beat. Every time I leave the mountains or woods, my mind turns to where I can get a good greasy meal and cold beverage. And no matter how grubby the restaurant is or how piss poor the food looks, it always ends up being the best meal I've ever had. Always.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“But we’re increasingly separated from the rough and raw nature of the world, divorced from any kind of natural obstacle or pain or work. In a modern society where gluten-free, pre-made meals are delivered to your doorstep and chauffeur-driven vehicles can be summoned with the push of a button, it’s important to get out and do a few damn things for yourself. To go get some dirt under your fingernails, to sweat and to struggle, maybe even to bleed. We need to face down the bear to feel fully alive.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread,” he wrote in The Yosemite. “Places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“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 as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“The acreage of our federal public lands is equivalent to the entire country of Germany seven times over. These lands provide space for hunting, fishing, and leisure activities; wildlife habitats; clean-water protection; sustainable industry; and much more. All for the public. It's about as profoundly American an idea as you can find: the democratization of land and resources and food and recreation and wildlife and scenery and space and solitude.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“The scenery and wildlife are native. The fundamental idea behind the parks is native. It is, in brief, that the country belongs to the people, that it is in the process of making for the enrichment of the lives of all of us. The parks stand as the outward symbol of this great human principle.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“I found myself squarely in the middle as an independent, gun-owning, pro-hunting, nature-loving, freethinking conservationist. Neither political party seemed to wholly represent me. In a climate of increasingly partisan politics, my independent stance felt not only unique, but also slightly disorienting.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“Writing about others like me who long to escape the “clutch of mechanistic civilization,” Bob Marshall said, “To them the enjoyment of solitude, complete independence, and the beauty of undefiled panoramas is absolutely essential to happiness. In the wilderness they enjoy the most worthwhile or perhaps the only worthwhile part of life.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“Roosevelt once said that he liked people “who take the next step, not those who theorize about the two hundredth.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“prosperous”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“You cannot improve upon it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. Keep it for your children and your children’s children and all who come after you as one of the great sights for Americans to see.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“Similar preliminary concessions were made to industries looking to exploit the areas around Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“There are some wild places across our nation's public lands that physically move you, creating a tightening in the chest, a loss of breath, or a tingling along the spine.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“We have gotten past the stage, my fellow-citizens, when we are to be pardoned if we treat any part of our country as something to be skinned for two or three years for the use of the present generation, whether it is the forest, the water, the scenery. Whatever it is, handle it so that your children’s children will get the benefit of it.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“This push and pull of land management led directly to the debate I was considering in 2016 when reading about the Bundy standoff at the Malheur Refuge, and in the subsequent months as I embarked on my public-land adventure. The landscapes Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot had fought to protect for all American people had been transformed into a political football, thrown back and forth, protected and cherished by some, lusted after as a resource by others.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread,”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“I desire again to urge upon the Congress the importance of authorizing the President to set aside certain portions of reserves, or other public lands, as game refuges for the preservation of bison, the wapiti, and other large beasts once so abundant in our woods and mountains, and on our great plains, and now tending toward extinction . . . We owe it to future generations to keep alive the noble and beautiful creatures which by their presence add such distinctive character to the American Wilderness.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“In its nine years of existence, it’s said that the Civilian Conservation Corps planted between two and three billion trees, cleared thirteen thousand miles of hiking trails, built more than forty thousand bridges and three thousand fire towers, helped establish more than seven hundred new state parks, made improvements in ninety-four national parks or monument areas, and developed fifty-two thousand acres of public campgrounds.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“The lumberman would like to cut more timber, the settler and miner would often like him to cut less. The county authorities want to see more money coming in for schools and roads, while the lumberman and stockman object to the rise in the value of timber and grass. But the interests of the people as a whole are, I repeat, safe in the hands of the Forest Service. By keeping the public forests in public hands our forest policy substitutes the good of the whole people for the profits of the privileged few.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“America today stands poised on a pinnacle of wealth and power,” he said. “Yet we live in a land of vanishing beauty, of increasing ugliness, of shrinking open space, and of an overall environment that is diminished daily by pollution and noise and blight. This, in brief, is the quiet conservation crisis of the 1960s.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“Pondering the reason we need wild spaces in Beyond the Wall, Abbey wrote, “There are many answers, all good, each sufficient. Peace is often mentioned; beauty; spiritual refreshment, whatever that means; re-creation for the soul, whatever that is; escape; novelty, the delight of something different; truth and understanding and wisdom—commendable virtues in any man, anytime; ecology and all that, meaning the salvation of variety, diversity, possibility and potentiality, the preservation of the genetic reservoir, the answers to questions that we have not yet even learned to ask, a connection to the origin of things, an opening into the future, a source of sanity for the present—all true, all wonderful, all more than enough to answer such a dumb dead degrading question as ‘Why wilderness?”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“Today, Americans who enjoy the most popular national forests have Roosevelt and Pinchot to thank. The famed rafting in Idaho’s Salmon-Challis National Forest, the Absaroka high-country fishing of Montana’s Custer Gallatin National Forest, the backcountry ski slopes of Utah’s Uinta National Forest, the soaring Sierra Nevada granite of California’s Inyo National Forest, the mule deer hunter’s dreamscape of Arizona’s Kaibab National Forest—each one exists because of our twenty-sixth president and his right-hand man.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands

“Unlike forest or seashore, mountain or city, plain or swamp, the desert, any desert, suggests always the promise of something unforeseeable, unknown but desirable, waiting around the next turn in the canyon wall, over the next ridge or mesa, somewhere within the wrinkled hills.”
― Mark Kenyon, That Wild Country: An Epic Journey through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands