Chase’s Reviews > A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There > Status Update

“Youth yet unborn still pole up the Missouri or climb the Sierras, and each generation in turn will ask: Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to day he went under while conservationists weren’t looking.”

“Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness… I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”

“I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.”

“Thus always does history, whether of marsh or market place, and in paradox… 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 wildness left to cherish.”

“Hemisphere solidarity is new among statesmen, but not among the feathered navies of the sky.”