Theodore Roosevelt 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.

I know there is pain when sawmills close and people lose jobs, but we have to make a choice. We need water and we need these forests.

You cannot, for instance, sustainably protect the environment if the majority of the people are still in primitive agriculture leading to the encroachment of forest reserves.

a culture is no better than its woods

We have now felled forest enough everywhere, in many districts far too much. Let us restore this one element of material life to its normal proportions, and devise means for maintaining the permanence of its relations to the fields, the meadows and the pastures, to the rain and the dews of heaven, to the springs and rivulets with which it waters down the earth.

A people without children would face a hopeless future; a country without trees is almost as helpless; forests which are so used that they cannot renew themselves will soon vanish, and with them all their benefits. A true forest is not merely a storehouse full of wood, but, as it were, a factory of wood and at the same time a reservoir of water. When you help to preserve our forests or plant new ones you are acting the part of good citizens.

The only trouble with the movement for the preservation of our forests is that it has not gone nearly far enough, and was not begun soon enough.

[W]hat have we done with our forests? Chopped them, and burned them, and wasted them; and now almost the last of the great stands of timber are here on the Pacific slope. We are in the center of the best of them. Probably nowhere on earth does there exist a forest to compare in continuous grandeur and unqualified beauty with the Redwoods that are found along the Eel River and to the north.

Our forests are not for toilet paper. They are worth more standing than cut. That deserves to be defended, not only by native peoples but also by environmentalists.

The very willow-rows lopped every three years for fuel or powder, - and every sizable pine and oak, or other forest tree, cut down within the memory of man! As if individual speculators were to be allowed to export the clouds out of the sky, or the stars out of the firmament, one by one. We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.

Much of the economic decay of southeast Asia (as of many other parts of the world) is undoubtedly due to a heedless and shameful neglect of trees.

I cannot imagine my hometown without forests, and I cannot imagine the earth turned into a desert.

You have to focus on what you're passionate about. For me it's the forests and of course, because I'm concerned about the forests, I'm concerned about the way paper is made.

It is shocking to smite down trees for mere decorations.

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

Every acre of forest should belong to the people.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

In most mills, only the best portions of the best trees are used, while the ruins are left on the ground to feed great fires which kill much of what is left of the less desirable timber, together with the seedlings on which the permanence of the forest depends.

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.

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.

Deforestation will continue as long as cutting down and burning trees is more economic than preserving them.