Words to Remember

Lyndon B. Johnson
“Once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature, his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.

Edward Abbey
“We will return, someday, and when we do, the gritty splendor and the complicated grandeur of Big Bend will still be here.”

Unknown Mexican Vaquero
“You go south from Fort Davis until you come to the place where rainbows wait for rain, where the river is kept in a big stone box and water runs uphill, and the mountains float in air, except at night when they go away to play with other mountains.”
~Cited by William O. Douglas in Farewell to Texas: A Vanishing Wilderness (1967)

George Meléndez Wright, the first true ecologist for the National Park Service and an integral part of a bi-national commission that drafted plans for Big Bend National Park in 1936.

“I believe that future generations will be grateful for the tracts of primitive area, or wilderness, which we can save in our national parks without hindering our own pleasure in the least”

George Meléndez Wright, “Bootstraps of Wildlife Conservation,” delivered before the National Association of Audubon Societies, New York City, October 29, 1935. P.8. Wright’s original presentation text is held by Pamela Meléndez Wright Lloyd.

“Before leaving the subject of lands devoted exclusively to complete protection, let me mention the problem of saving the few remaining primitive wildernesses of great extent.
…[T]his is important in a national conservation program and the setting aside of these areas would be a form of use and not a withdrawal from use…”

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