James Balog Quotes

The lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world are not reserved for scientists but are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of earth, sea and sky and their amazing life.

I think a healthy connection with the natural world actually makes us more human.

It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature.

Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is paradoxical act of sadistic admiration.

The relationship of humans to nature. We are sadly divorced from it.

If we could, and we must, establish a deep long abiding relationship with nature, with the actual trees, the bushes, the flowers, the grass and the fast moving clouds, then we would never slaughter another human being for any reason whatsoever.

If you lose touch with nature you lose touch with humanity.

Here man is no longer the center of the world, only a witness, but a witness who is also a partner in the silent life of Nature, bound by secret affinities of the trees.

Whatever peace I know rests in the natural world, in feeling myself a part of it, even in a small way.

We realize the indivisibility of the earth - its soil, mountains, rivers, forests, climate, plants, and animals - and respect it collectively not only as a useful servant but as a living being, vastly less alive than ourselves in degree, but vastly greater than ourselves in time and space - a being that was old when the morning stars sang together, and when the last of us has been gathered unto his fathers, will still be young.

Make friends with nature by working in harmony with her and she will make friends with you.

But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.

For real company and friendship, there is nothing outside the animal kingdom that is comparable to a river.

What I really believe is the only hopeful relation between our life and the whole of life is one of reverence and respect and of feeling at one with it. The other attitude which is the one our society is based on is devastating and it is killing the earth and it is killing us too.

One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples.

It were happy if we studied nature more in natural things; and acted according to nature, whose rules are few, plain, and most reasonable.

It's probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it.

The more I see of life the more I perceive that only through solitary communion with nature can one gain an idea of its richness and meaning.

The truth of the matter is, the birds could very well live without us, but many -- perhaps all -- of us would find life incomplete, indeed almost intolerable without the birds.

If the earth is man's extended body, to be loved and respected as one's own body, those who do no greening of themselves will hardly bring about the greening of America. The idea of 'greening' involves color, flowering, freshness of spring, and, above all, respect for what is organic and vegetative as distinct from the mechanical and metallic.

Never a day passes but that I do myself the honor to commune with some of nature's varied forms.

Nature is rarely allowed to enter the sacred portals of civilized society.

How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the contemplation of natural phenomena to the preservation of moral and intellectual health!

The world is so tremendously spectacular that every visual, sense, and sparked connection swells my unrestrained passion for life. I find I feel this the most when I am immersed in nature and sliding into the bloodstream of the wilderness.