Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last hardly longer than those of wood rats, while their more enduring monuments, excepting those wrought on the forests by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds, vanish in a few centuries.

John Muir

John Muir

Bark Birds Brush Centuries Enduring Few Fires Forests Hardly Hunting Hurt Hut Improve Indians Landscape Last Longer Made Monuments More Rats Softly Squirrels Than Those Vanish Walk While Wood Wrought

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In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

Man is so made that when anything fires his soul, impossibilities vanish.

— Jean de La Fontaine

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The practical importance of the preservation of our forests is augmented by their relations to climate, soil and streams.

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If [Hamilton] hadn't done that, they might have gone to the rats and fires. Virtually everything in here, there are not copies of anywhere else.

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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.

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