Leonard Boswell Quotes

Maintaining healthy forests is essential to those who make a living from the land and for those of us who use them for recreational purposes.

Every acre of forest should belong to the people.

Every other civilized nation in the world has been compelled to care for its forests, and so must we if waste and destruction are not to go on to the bitter end, leaving America as barren as Palestine or Spain.

If I have my way, I'm going to dissolve the Forest Service. They're in the business of harvesting trees and they're not harvesting trees, so why have them anymore?

As a nation we have not yet come to have a proper respect for the forest and to regard it as an indispensable part of our resources—one which is easily destroyed but difficult to replace; one which confers great benefits while it endures, but whose disappearance is accompanied by a train of evil consequences not readily foreseen and positively irreparable.

The primary object of our forest policy, as of the land policy of the United States, is the making of prosperous homes… You can start a prosperous home by destroying the forests, but you cannot keep it prosperous that way.

As a lifelong Oregonian, I prefer our forests green, not black.

There's a basic kind of tension here. It's between those who say, I'd like to clear cut this forest and reduce it to saw timber because that's an economically productive thing for me to do.

Congo, my country, has the largest forest in Africa, maybe the second-largest in the world. I was born in a forest area, and when I was growing up, I assisted my uncle, who was a poacher. That was good, because it grew my passion for protecting the forest and plants.

If you have forest, if you have green forest, the water table goes up. What happens with deforestation is the water level goes down and we all know how much importance drinking water has.

The beginnings of a forest is one of the ugliest things on the planet. It's bleak and your neighbours hate you.

Our lifestyle, our wildlife, our land and our water remain critical to our definition of Wyoming and to our economic future.

Our government has done nothing effective with its forests, though the best in the world, but is like a rich and foolish spendthrift who has inherited a magnificent estate in perfect order, and then has left his rich fields and meadows, forests and parks, to be sold and plundered and wasted at will …

Our performance should be based on the long-term health of the land, rather than the number of board feet produced.

Most of our political support for forest preservation comes from the Northeast where there are few forests. The Americans back East realize that they have made a historical mistake and failed to preserve and protect their original forests, and they don’t want the rest of the country to make the same mistake.

If a man farms his land to the waste of the soil or the tress, he destroys not only his own assets but Nature's assets.

There is more old growth forest today in California today than there was in 1850. The Indians had destroyed most of them.

Our forest policy is not to preserve forests because they are beautiful—though that is a good in itself—not to preserve them because they are refuges for wild creatures of the wilderness—though that is a good in itself—but rather to conserve them in order to guarantee a steady and continuous supply of timber, grass, and above all, water.

The practical importance of the preservation of our forests is augmented by their relations to climate, soil and streams.

We can halt the destruction of the world's rainforests - and even restore parts of them - in order to ensure that the forests do what they are so good at - in other words, storing carbon naturally.

Forest restoration is a challenging and complex undertaking of raising young trees, transplanting them, and then cultivating them year in, year out in the face of harsh challenges of nature; it is a gigantic nature transformation project to turn all the mountains of the country into 'treasure mountains,' into 'gold mountains.'

We've all got to come together, and we've got to protect what's left of our ancient forests on this planet.

I am not against development, but society will go nowhere if you don't take care of trees.

No other country in the world has as many forests as we do.

Timber extraction provides big profits at the expense of local communities. Providing communities with unfettered access to harvest a forest that is protected in perpetuity provides better and more reliable incomes.