NOLS Wilderness Wisdom

By John Gookin

More than 1,000 quotes from close to 600 sources in categories ranging from leadership to diversity and inclusion to environmental ethics to expedition planning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stackpole Books
• Release date: Jul 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780811748827

Book preview

NOLS

Wilderness Wisdom

Quotes for Inspirational Exploration

_________________

SECOND EDITION

edited by John Gookin

STACKPOLE

BOOKS

Copyright © 2012 by The National Outdoor Leadership School

Published by

STACKPOLE BOOKS

5067 Ritter Road

Mechanicsburg, PA 17055

www.stackpolebooks.com

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Stackpole Books, 5067 Ritter Road, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania 17055.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cover design by Caroline Stover

Cover photograph by Pascal Beauvais, NOLS instructor

The print edition of this title was manufactured to FSC standards using paper from responsible sources

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

NOLS wilderness wisdom : quotes for inspirational exploration / edited by John Gookin.

   p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8117-1096-1 (pbk.)

ISBN-10: 0-8117-1096-3 (pbk.)

1. Nature—Quotations, maxims, etc. 2. Outdoor life—Quotations, maxims, etc. I. Gookin, John. II. National Outdoor Leadership School (U.S.)

PN6084.N2W55 2012

508—dc23

2012003359

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Contents

Introduction

Beauty

Biodiversity

Character

Citizenship

Climbing

Commitment

Communication

Community

Competence

Conflict Resolution

Conservation

Desert

Diversity and Inclusion

Endurance

Environmental Ethics

Expedition Behavior

Expedition Planning

Experiential Education

Exploration, Adventure, and Discovery

Failure and Success

Fear and Courage

Feedback

Fishing

Friendship

Hiking

Individuality

Initiative

Judgment and Decision-Making

Leadership

Mountains

Natural Rhythms

Observation

Oceans

Paddling

Peak Performance

Positive Attitude

Respect

Responsibility

Rivers

Self-Awareness

Self-Differentiation

Self-Leadership

Self-Sufficiency

Service

Spirit

Spirituality

Stewardship

Taking Risks

Teamwork

Tolerance for Adversity

Vision and Action

Wilderness and Environmental Education

The Wilderness Experience

Women

End Quotes

Author Index

Wisdom seems more compelling when expressed in a quote. Well-chosen words give structure to an entire chain of experiences. There is education and comfort in the notion that others have already navigated life’s turbulent waters.

Andy Dappen

Introduction

The readings in this book are organized to reflect the curriculum, values, and mission of the National Outdoor Leadership School, and have been compiled from the collections of various instructors over several decades. Currently NOLS has nearly 700 instructors and over 60,000 alumni throughout the world. Together they form a diverse and spirited group of individuals. While each uses readings in a variety of ways, here are some general thoughts that may help you to best use this book.

A good quote helps us to better understand our life experiences. While we may feel an intuitive appreciation for an experience, a quote that precisely articulates what we are feeling allows us to view the experience in a new light. We see the bigger picture. With this increased awareness we can take our initial feelings and turn them into a philosophy of life.

Finding this kind of inspiration in quotes is a personal process. Some will ring true for you; others won’t. It is up to each of us to find our own inspiration in life’s events. Use the thoughts that resonate for you in order to define the life that you desire.

If a quote inspires you, use it carefully with others. With old friends we may be able to blurt some quote out and have it appreciated. With recent acquaintances, we should be more cautious by saying that the reading is one that inspired us, and that we would like to share it. We don’t need to apologize for how we feel about the idea, but it would be insensitive of us to expect others to always share our feelings.

As we have collected the quotes in this book we have used them not just as a path to individual inspiration but also as a means of group discussion. By provoking thought and encouraging conversation with others, these readings have helped us to discuss important ethical questions and the values we share as a community.

Building this collection was a team effort. Thank you to Mike Clelland, Jeff Louden, Heather MacLeod, Aimee Hoyt, Willie Williams, Jim Chisholm, Morgan Hite, and others for both their contributions and their sage advice.

Beauty

Beauty—the adjustment of all parts proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole.

Leon Battista Alberti

Far away in the sunshine are my highest inspirations. I may not read them, but I can look up and see the beauty, believe in them and try to follow where they lead.

Louisa May Alcott

All beauty has some strangeness of proportion.

Francis Bacon

That wonderful world of high mountains, dazzling in their rock and ice, acts as a catalyst. It suggests the infinite but it is not the infinite. The heights only give us what we ourselves bring them.

Lucien Devies

Not everything that counts can be measured. Not everything that can be measured counts.

Albert Einstein

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature

The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we truly live.

Richard Jefferies

Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it.

W. Somerset Maugham

These beautiful days must enrich all my life. They do not exist as mere pictures—maps hung upon the walls of memory—but they saturate themselves into every part of my body and live always.

John Muir

Beauty is composed of many things and never stands alone. It is part of horizons, blue in the distance, great primeval silences, knowledge of all things on earth. . . . It is so fragile it can be destroyed by a sound or a thought. It may be infinitesimally small or encompass the universe itself. It comes in a swift conception wherever nature has not been disturbed.

Sigurd Olson

The heavens declare God’s glory and the magnificence of what made them. Each new dawn is a miracle; each new sky fills with beauty. Their testimony speaks to the whole world and reaches to the ends of the earth. In them is a path for the sun, who steps forth handsome as a bridegroom and rejoices like an athlete as he runs. He starts at one end of the heavens and circles to the other end, and nothing can hide from his heat.

Psalms 19:1–6

I am roaring drunk with the lust of life and adventure and unbearable beauty.

Everett Ruess

Biodiversity

The swift metamorphosis and the onward march of civilization, sweeping ever westward and transforming and taming our wilderness, fills us with a strange regret, and we rejoice that parts of that wilderness will yet remain to us unchanged.

William S. Bracket

Diversity, be it ever so little, has value in relieving stress.

Frank Fraser Darling

When a community or species has no known worth or other economic value to humanity, it is as dishonest and unwise to trump up weak resource values for it as it is unnecessary to abandon the effort to conserve it.

David Ehrenfeld

The Arrogance of Humanism

We consider species to be like a brick in the foundation of a building. You can probably lose one or two or a dozen bricks and still have a standing house. But by the time you’ve lost twenty percent of species, you’re going to destabilize the entire structure. That’s the way ecosystems work.

Donald Falk

The Christian Science Monitor, May 26, 1989

The links between ecosystem and human health are many and obvious: the value in wetlands of filtering pollutants out of groundwater aquifers; the potential future medical use of different plants’ genetic material; the human health effects of heavy metal accumulation in fish and shellfish. It is clear that healthy ecosystems provide the underpinnings for the long-term health of economies and societies.

F. Henry Habicht

former Deputy Administrator, EPA

Natural species are the library from which genetic engineers can work.

Thomas E. Lovejoy

In our concern for the whooping crane we are at once symbolizing and concealing a far deeper anxiety—namely, the prospective total extermination of all species.

Lewis Mumford

The Future Environments of America

Without knowing it, we utilize hundreds of products each day that owe their origin to wild animals and plants. Indeed our welfare is intimately tied up with the welfare of wildlife. Well may conservationists proclaim that by saving the lives of wild species, we may be saving our own.

Norman Myers

The habitat of an organism is the place where it lives, or the place where one would go to find it. The ecological niche, on the other hand, is the position or status of an organism within its community and ecosystem resulting from the organism’s structural adaptations, physiological responses and specific behavior (inherited and/or learned). The ecological niche of an organism depends not only on where it lives, but also on what it does. By analogy, it may be said that the habitat is the organism’s address, and the niche is its profession, biologically speaking.

William E. Odum

Fundamentals of Ecology

Relatively few benefits have flowed to the people who live closest to the more than 3,000 protected areas that have been established in tropical countries during the past 50 years. For this reason, the preservation of biodiversity is often thought of as something that poor people are asked to do to fulfill the wishes of rich people living in comfort thousands of miles away.

Peter H. Raven

The coastal zone may be the single most important portion of our planet. The loss of its biodiversity may have repercussions far beyond our worst fears.

G. Carleton Ray

Biodiversity

Why do they prefer to tell stories about the possible medicinal benefits of the Houston toad rather than to offer moral reasons for supporting the Endangered Species Act? That law is plainly ideological; it is hardly to be excused on economic grounds.

Mark Sagoff

Thus, remarkably, we do not know the true number of species on earth even to the nearest order of magnitude. My own guess, based on the described fauna and flora and many discussions with entomologists and other specialists, is that the absolute number falls somewhere between five and thirty million.

Edward O. Wilson

Conservation for the 21st Century

Character

A person may be qualified to do greater good to humankind and become more beneficial to the world, by morality without faith than by faith without morality.

Joseph Addison

A cloudy day, or a little sunshine, have as great an influence on many constitutions as the most sacred blessings or misfortunes.

Joseph Addison

We are what we consistently do. Excellence is defined by our habits.

Aristotle

Modesty is hardly to be described as a virtue. It is a feeling rather than a disposition. It is a kind of fear of falling into disrepute.

Aristotle

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.

Isaac Asimov

Polish doesn’t change quartz into a diamond.

Wilma Askinas

The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.

Margaret Atwood

Character builds slowly, but it can be torn down with

Reviews for NOLS Wilderness Wisdom

[wunder-62679 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Just the thing for a Scoutmaster Minute. Find a quote that speaks to you and addresses something in the troop. Tie them together, done.