"I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred 'great books' - and one brave deed is worth a thousand."

"The entire area - some 300 square kilometers - is sacred. There are shrines and temples dotted about the slopes, but they merely confirm the sanctity of the land. It is not in the shrines and temples that the gods live, but in the mountains themselves. [about the Three Holy Mountains of Dewa - Haguro, Gassam, and Yodono]."

"Then the immortal heart of the woods will beat against ours and its subtle life will steal into our veins and make us its own forever, so that no matter where we go or how widely we wander we shall yet be drawn back to the forest to find our most enduring kinship."

"The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man."

"As the people of Shishmaref lose their natural hunting grounds to the warming sea, they are forced to buy U.S. Canned goods from the only local store on the island; however, this is not their natural diet and cannot sustain them throughout the year."

"When I saw how many people were objecting to the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea, I realized that there needed to be an open and honest discussion about the toxicity of the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit and the health and safety issues of astronomical observatories."

"There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently."