Mary Oliver Quotes

Our conservation laws are based on static ideas about nature—not landscapes that are rapidly changing because of something humans did.

If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers.

The snake kills by squeezing very slowly. This is how the civilized world slowly, slowly pushes into the forest and takes away the world that used to be.

Everybody's seen a stream or a wood they knew replaced by a strip mall.

We are aware only of the empty space in the forest, which only yesterday was filled with trees.

I wrote 'Big Yellow Taxi' on my first trip to Hawaii. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart this blight on paradise. That's when I sat down and wrote the song.

The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.

Even if one tree falls down it wouldn't affect the entire forest.

To be in the woods is a special thing. And also just the concept of wilderness as a necessary opposite in a kind of global dialectic. I want there to be wilderness where there are no humans in a world like this. So nature is super important.

My first school is gone - turned into flats.

It is progress when a centuries-old oak is cut down to give space for a road sign.

Where have all the flowers gone

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

A tree is beautiful, but what’s more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees. Forests create climate, climate influences peoples’ character, and so on and so forth. There can be neither civilization nor happiness if forests crash down under the axe, if the climate is harsh and severe, if people are also harsh and severe. ... What a terrible future!

For the most part we don’t have an immediate impact on the species that surrounds us. But we do have an immediate impact on their habitat which determines whether they survive on in some cases shift their ground.

In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.

If America wishes to preserve her native birds, we must help supply what civilization has taken from them. The building of cities and towns, the cutting down of forests, and the draining of pools and swamps have deprived American birds of their original homes and food supply.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

Part of being in New York is being able to brag about what used to be there.

Agriculture changes the landscape more than anything else we do. It alters the composition of species. We don't realize it when we sit down to eat, but that is our most profound engagement with the rest of nature.

The Old Vegas is gone. It's not that it's necessarily better or worse; it's just totally different.

I see how these beautiful forests are now open to destruction because of technology. Companies are able to get into more and more remote places that weren't economically viable before.

The planet is beautiful.

The alpine environment is very delicate. I've been able to see change in the mountains in the 20 years that I've been climbing full-time. Glaciers have receded. The tree-line is changing. That's very rapid to see nature changing in a 20-year period.

We can see the weather change, that the birds don't come to the city anymore... we seriously have to think about preserving nature.