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Introduction

 

Gathered together here are hundreds of quotations, all of them in one way or another, relating to the natural history of North America and to its environment.

The subject matter is as diverse as the American continent and the plant and animal life that is native to it.

There are many distinctive and individual viewpoints presented in this conclave of minds. Together, they span Western man's experience in North America. A few pre-date that. Dealing with large themes as they invariably do, it seems logical that there would be a diversity of thoughts and impressions. Thus, there are paeans of praise and adulation over the wonders of nature, but they are matched and counterbalanced by cool appraisals and scientific objectivity. Included too are a few entries that express human indifference, cruelty, and greed in regard to the natural world.

While collecting this material, I discovered writers who are relatively new to the scene and I rediscovered a number of old favorites.

Some of the books from which these quotations have been gathered have nourished and enriched my mind for many years. Works by Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Henry Beston, Loren Eiseley, Hal Borland, Joseph Wood Krutch, Peter Matthiessen, and Donald Culross Peattie come quickly to mind.

In recent years, I have grown fond of some of the things Edward Abbey wrote and, of course, like everybody else, I swear by Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek. Along the way, I've also rediscovered the early environmental warnings and poignant prose of writers like John Burroughs, W. H. Hudson, Joseph Wood Krutch, and John Muir, to name a few.

Equally rewarding, I encountered a host of new writers, people-almost to a man or a woman-captivated not only by the grandeur of the American environment and its inhabitants, but intently mindful of its least members. Their names are too numerous to mention but you will find them all in the pages that follow.

Many of the selections deal with ecological and environmental problems, others touch on various phases of American natural history. More than a few quotations were included for the sheer elegance of the prose.

Geographically, the material ranges from Maine to Florida to Texas and up across the Great Plains, and beyond to the West Coast, then north to Alaska and across the sweep of Canada. There are a few excursions south, beyond the Rio Grande and the Gulf of Mexico into the neotropics.

Although most of the authors' works included here were published after World War II there is, nevertheless, a reaching back to see what some of the brilliant minds of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had to say about nature. And a few entries are from even earlier times.

Some inclusions are distressing to read, but they illustrate the days of unregulated exploitation when market hunters and unprincipled "sportsmen" wiped out or came close to annihilating many of our native species of birds and animals. More often than not, the quotes recall how abundant some of these species once were.

No effort has been made to include skeptics of the environmental movement, or of those politicians and their cronies who kowtow to the very people who are defiling and contaminating the world.

The knowledge and the thoughts conveyed through this collection of quotations should be of use to people in many fields of endeavor, most obviously to those in environmental, ecological, biological, and natural history research and writing. But I hope the material will also be of value to all teachers and students at any academic level; to editors, historians, legislators, public speakers, persons in the media, and a host of other professional people. Most of all, I hope this collection is a joy to those who just like to read about nature, as well as a source-book for those concerned about the environment.

The project of reading and selecting these offerings covered a period of several years. I suppose that the process could have gone on indefinitely but, eventually, I felt that I had arrived at a generous and representative aggregate of what I had in mind when I set out on this intellectual journey. And, I must add, the enterprise was the equivalent of going back to college and getting another degree. It was also like a rare treasure hunt, or panning for gold and, happily, I am able to share these gems of wisdom and flecks of bullion with my readers.

So, as in the Latin expression, Vade Mecum, this is an invitation to "go with me," to share in this gathering together of comments, observations, opinions, and beliefs about American natural history and the environment. Above all, I hope that it enables the reader to sense in every way the importance of environmental matters, while at the same time perceiving he exquisite beauty and the wonder of what remains of our natural heritage, and why it must be saved.

One final note. Birth and death dates are only occasionally included in the biographical sketches of the contributors. In the case of contemporary authors, it would be unrealistic to suggest that the biographical data are always up-to-date. In most cases, the information relayed to the reader is of a general nature, was relevant at the time a particular work was published, and is intended only to provide the reader with a basic framework of reference.

In one way, all of the people in these pages live on, their knowledge unencumbered by clocks and calendars.

 

Tom Thomson

September 30, 1995

Copyrighted 1997