The Modern Dogma Is Comfort

Our Ability To Perceive Quality In Nature Begins, As In Art, With The Pretty. It Expands Through Successive Stages Of The Beautiful To Values As Yet Uncaptured By Language.

Conservationists Have, I Fear, Adopted The Pedagogical Method Of The Prophets: We Mutter Darkly About Impending Doom If People Don't Mend Their Ways. The Doom Is Impending, All Right; No One Can Be An Ecologist, Even An Amateur One, Without Seeing It. But Do People Mend Their Ways For Fear Of Calamity? I Doubt It. They Are More Likely To Do It Out Of Pure Curiosity And Interest.

For One Species To Mourn The Death Of Another Is A New Thing Under The Sun.

There Is Yet No Ethic Dealing With Man's Relation To Land And To The Animals And Plants Which Grow Upon It. Land, Like Odysseus' Slave-girls, Is Still Property. The Land-relation Is Still Strictly Economic, Entailing Privileges But Not Obligations.

...to Any One For Whom Wild Things Are Something More Than A Pleasant Diversion, (conservation) Constitutes One Of The Milestones In Moral Evolution.