Edward Abbey et sa vieille Ford.

CITATIONS SAUVAGES
WILD QUOTES

Wilderness begins in the human mind.
- Edward Abbey

If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.
- Edward Abbey

We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth, as 'wild.' Only to the white man was nature a "wilderness" and only to him was the land 'infested' with 'wild' animals and 'savage' people.
- Luther Standing Bear (1933), Major Problems, 395

Finalement, la nature, le sauvage, non pas tant comme espace vierge que comme ce qui pousse là où on ne l’attend pas et laisse ainsi penser à notre arrogance que nous sommes loin d’en avoir fini avec la nature.
- Catherine Larrère

Penser le sauvage et sa préservation, c’est rechercher, contre l’exploitation qui le détruit, la conservation qui le fige et la célébration qui l’exalte, la voie étroite d’une bonne distance avec ce fond équivoque, à la fois vital et dangereux, d'où provient toute vie.
- Bruce Bégout et Barbara Stiegler

Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization.
- Edward Abbey

The essence of true wilderness is big mammals that can eat you.
- Edward Abbey

A wilderness in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.
- Wilderness Act, 1964

Historians believe that one of the most distinguishing characteristics of American culture is the fact that it emerged from a wilderness in less than four centuries.
- Roderick Nash, 1977, Major Problems, 395

Upon close scrutiny, the simple, popular wilderness idea dissolves before one's gaze (...) The definition enshrines a bifurcation of man and nature (...) Second, the popular wilderness idea is ethnocentric (...) Nash (...) skates rapidly over American Indian complaints that the very concept of wilderness is a racist idea.
- J. Baird Callicott, "The Wilderness Idea Revisited" (1991), in Major Problems, p. 409, 410

Defining our wilderness experience as a quest for the presence of wild nature, not the absence of humans, creates conceptual space for the interwoven continuum of nature and culture, and for that recognition of the presence of the wild (...) both in wilderness and in places closer to home (...) This may be what we need to help us end the opposition between culture and nature, the garden and the wilderness, and to come to recognize ourselves at last as at home in both.
- Val Plumwood, "Wilderness Skepticism and Wilderness Dualism" (1998)

The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chain saws.
- Edward Abbey

Lectures
Readings

THE GREAT NEW WILDERNESS DEBATE, Callicott ed., Univ. Georgia, 1998
THE WILDERNESS DEBATE RAGES ON, Nelson and Callicott ed., idem, 2008

WILD THOUGHTS FROM WILD PLACES, David Quammen, Scribner, 1999