Nick Rahall Quotes

The site I landed on feels much more isolated than it really is; it's almost magical. Within its limited radius, there was a whole range of the local ecology.

We all understand that compromise is part of the legislative process, yet at the same time, I would submit that wilderness is not for sale.

We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men.

Romney Marsh remains one of the last great wildernesses of south-east England. Flat as a desert, and at times just as daunting, it is an odd, occasionally eerie wetland straddling the coastal borders of Kent and Sussex, rich in birds, local folklore and solitary medieval churches.

No one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.

The Sanctuary at Two Rivers offers a much needed escape or retreat from the fast paced, modern lifestyle we have all become accustomed to, with its exquisite beauty, serenity, and raw nature. Costa Rica was the perfect place for developing such an important project.

The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.

Nature is a petrified magic city.

In the hierarchy of public lands, national parks by law have been above the rest: America's most special places, where natural beauty and all its attendant pleasures - quiet waters, the scents of fir and balsam, the hoot of an owl, and the dark of a night sky unsullied by city lights - are sacrosanct.

If you've ever walked a mile into a virgin forest - you know, like a deep forest where trees have been uncut - the energy is totally different from the shopping mall.

Simply put, I believe we should not seek the lowest common denominator when it comes to wilderness and saddle a wilderness designation with exceptions, exclusions, and exemptions.

There's a real purity in New Zealand that doesn't exist in the states. It's actually not an easy thing to find in our world anymore. It's a unique place because it is so far away from the rest of the world. There is a sense of isolation and also being protected.

I love being immersed in nature, going to places in the world that are pristine and untouched by man. It's almost a religious experience when you go to a place like the Amazon, and there's no civilisation for thousands of miles.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

The Indians, they don't fully understand that a lot of the things that they currently take for granted on those lands, they won't be able to do if it's made clearly into a monument or a wilderness. Once you put a monument there, you do restrict a lot of things that could be done, and that includes use of the land... Just take my word for it.

I love creating hideaways. My idea is to go to the most beautiful, unspoilt places, buy the land, and make sure it is never damaged. I've always admired John D. Rockefeller, who bought up tracts of land to ensure they were left wild in perpetuity.

When California was wild, it was the floweriest part of the continent.

Northern Wisconsin, where I'm from, is so ridiculously rural.

There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of the giant sequoias and redwoods, the Canyon of the Colorado, the Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Three Tetons; and our people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their children's children forever, with their majestic beauty all unmarred.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .

The healing of our relationship with place begins with the preservation of the natural environment. We cannot go to the wild for renewal if no wilderness is left.

We need wilderness preserved-as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds-because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.

Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism.

Wilderness is a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks' pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.