"The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children."
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian
"Wilderness and the life dependent on it are fragile entities. They can be destroyed in a matter of years, if not days. Legislative protection is the surest way to maintain a wilderness reserve on our hungry and crowded planet. When wilderness is protected, watershed is protected. Biological diversity is protected. Game is protected. The proper functioning of a natural system is protected. Our quality of life is protected."
- Rep. Wayne Owens (D-UT) on his bill, H.R. 1500, to protect 5.7 million acres of southern Utah, Wilderness at the Edge
"The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired in value."
- Theodore Roosevelt
"The Utah deserts and plateaus and canyons are not a country of big returns, but a country of spiritual healing, incomparable for contemplation, meditation, solitude, quiet, awe, peace of mind and body. We were born of wilderness, and we respond to it more than we sometimes realize. We depend upon it increasingly for relief from the termite life we have created. Factories, power plants, resorts, we can make anywhere. Wilderness, once we have given it up, is beyond our reconstruction."
- Wallace Stegner, Wilderness at the Edge, 1990
"If we allow ourselves to put aside our arrogance long enough, perhaps we can read the lesson written in the eyes of lizards and deer deep in the land of stone time: this world and its creatures were not presented to us; we were joined to them in the exquisite saraband of life. The arrangement was never meant to be a conquest, and it is more deeply complex than a responsibility. It is a sharing."
- T.H. Watkins, Stone Time, Southern Utah: A Portrait and Meditation
"{W}e must learn, finally, that wilderness is not, as our history has insisted, a threat to be conquered but in fact a lesson to be embraced. For in wilderness, as in the eyes of the wild creatures that inhabit it, we find something that binds us firmly to the long history of life on earth, something that can teach us how to live in this place, how to accept our limitations, how to celebrate the love we feel when we let ourselves feel it for all other living creatures.
And there is another history to be found in the wild, a history we humans can so far only guess at, and this too, must be honored. It begins beyond human time, somewhere in the realms where stars are born. It intrigues me, this dimension of time. I would like to tell its history with some of the careless facility with which I have rendered so much human history, but I cannot. I can neither know the history nor tell it. But here in canyon country sometimes I think I can feel it and take strength from it.
I will remember, always, the moment when I discovered the dancing image of Kokopelli on a stone in a secret place ... Whatever the precise message its maker wanted to pass along, I know that the antic figure speaks also of time, stone time. I look at it and know that I will return to this place again and again, a place as central to my knowledge now as all the memories of my life and my family's life, all the history I have learned, all the books I may have read or all the words I may have written. When I do, I will touch the stone ... and dream of stars."
- T.H. Watkins, Stone Time, Southern Utah: A Portrait and a Meditation
