Quotes

   In time, ownership of property will probably carry with it certain obligations, over and above the obligation to pay the tax and keep the mortgage going. There are signs that this is coming, and I think it should come. Today if a landowner feels the urge, he can put a steam shovel into his hillside pasture and disembowel it. He can set his plow against the contours and let his wealth run down into the brook and into the sea. He can sell his topsoil off by the load and make a gravel pit of a hayfield. For all the interference he will get from the community, he can dig through to China, exploiting as he goes. With an axe in his hand, he can annihilate the woods, leaving brush piles and stumps. He can build any sort of building he chooses on his land in the shape of a square or an octagon or a milk bottle. Except in zoned areas he can erect any sort of sign. Nobody can tell him where to head in–it is his land and this is a free country. Yet people are beginning to suspect that the greatest freedom is not achieved by sheer irresponsibility.

   The earth is common ground and we are all overlords, whether we hold title or not; gradually the idea is taking form that the land must be held in safekeeping, that one generation is to some extent responsible to the next, and that it is contrary to the public good to allow an individual, merely because of his whims or ambitions, to destroy almost beyond repair any part of the soil or water or even the view.

E. B. White One Man’s Meat 1950

   The boatmen appeared to lead an easy and contented life, and we thought that we should prefer their employment ourselves to many professions which are much more sought after. They suggested how few circumstances are necessary to the well-being and serenity of man, how indifferent all employments are, and that any may seem noble and poetic in the eyes of men, if pursued with sufficient buoyancy and freedom... One can hardly imagine a more healthful employment, and one more favorable to contemplation and the observation... They were a sort of fabulous rivermen to us. It was unconceivable by what sort of meditation any mere landsman could hold communication with them.

Henry David Thoreau,
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers