Simply put, I believe we should not seek the lowest common denominator when it comes to wilderness and saddle a wilderness designation with exceptions, exclusions, and exemptions.
Don't complain. The Israelites wasted forty years murmuring and complaining in the wilderness, when they could have just obeyed God and entered into their Promised Land.
The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.
The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.
For a variety of reasons, I believe, the time is right to resolve many of the long standing and thorny land use, recreation, and wilderness designation issues in Central Idaho.
I come from pioneer stock, developers of the West, people who went out into the wilderness and set up home with nothing but a pair of oxen.
To be in the woods is a special thing. And also just the concept of wilderness as a necessary opposite in a kind of global dialectic. I want there to be wilderness where there are no humans in a world like this. So nature is super important.
As a student I'd done work with a charity that took inner-city kids from disadvantaged areas and introduced them to hiking and climbing in the wilderness.
To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.
My mind became agitated with the enquiry - why a nation, separated from us by an ocean more than three thousand miles in extent, should endeavor to enforce on us plans of subjugation, the most unnatural in themselves, unjust, inhuman in their operations, and unpractised even by the uncivilized savages of the wilderness?
I went to Australia and did a three day hike with my fiance through the wilderness, which was nice.
I don't like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It's just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.
My ancestors wandered lost in the wilderness for forty years because even in biblical times, men would not stop to ask for directions.
Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.
Surrounded by a burgeoning human population, Asian elephants have to contend with the spread of settlements and farming, and the demands of rapidly developing nations: plantations, mines, railways, and irrigation canals have carved up former wilderness.
Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.
We all understand that compromise is part of the legislative process, yet at the same time, I would submit that wilderness is not for sale.
Madam Speaker, I have spent more than half my life as a member of the Resources Committee. In that time I have supported numerous wilderness designations. In fact, I cannot recall ever opposing a wilderness bill.
Wilderness, like the national park system, was an American idea.