Birds should be saved because of utilitarian reasons; and, moreover, they should be saved because of reasons unconnected with any return in dollars and cents. A grove of giant redwoods or sequoias should be kept just as we keep a great and beautiful cathedral. The extermination of the passenger pigeon meant that mankind was just so much poorer; exactly as in the case of the destruction of the cathedral at Rheims.
Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) US President (1901-1909)
“Bird Reserves at the Mouth of the Mississippi,” A Book Lover’s Holiday in the Open (1916)
Quotations about:
conservation
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There is no unemployed force in Nature. All decomposition is recomposition.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, poet
“The Man of Letters,” Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1883)
