Land Clearing Quotes & Sayings

What is proposed herein is that we have no right, nor any ethical justification, for clearing land or using wilderness while we tread over lawns, create erosion, and use land inefficiently. Our responsibility is to put our house in order. Should we do so, there will never be any need to destroy wilderness. — Bill Mollison

After clearing the land, planting the orchard, building the house and barn, and surviving the Great Depression, our father died suddenly one winter night when we were small, leaving us to learn about loss before we even knew its name. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

On the last Saturday of every month, Rwanda goes to work for itself: clearing land, building classrooms, making roads. On these national days of community work, known as umuganda, most shops and businesses are closed. Umuganda is a national priority, and everyone is expected to participate. — Patricia Crisafulli

The boat has become supreme isolation, chosen isolation, holding myself apart from the world, which I only dimly understand anyway. I can sit on the aft deck and never be surprised by anything again- no phone will ever ring, no one will knock that I haven't seen coming for a quarter mile. that I can go to sleep any night and wake up having broken loose- a failed knot, a line frayed, the anchor dragged- that I can drift out of sight of land makes a twisted sense, in line with my internal weather. When everything has proven tenuous one can either move toward permanence or toward impermanence. The boat's sublimely impermanent. Some mornings the fog's so thick that I exist only in a tight globe of clearing, beyond which is all foghorn and unknown. — Nick Flynn

The strange white world lay stroked by silence. No birds sang. The garden was no longer there, in this forested land. Nor were the out-buildings nor the old crumbling walls. There lay only a narrow clearing round the house now, hummocked with unbroken snowdrifts, before the trees began, with a narrow path leading away. — Susan Cooper

Leaf was staring down into shadow, and Thunder followed his gaze. The land dropped away into a small ravine. Moonlight pooled at the bottom, lighting a clearing ringed by bracken and trees. — Erin Hunter

Haska - a dim legendary figure of a generation ago, who went back up the mountain and cleared six acres of brush in the tiny valley that took his name. He broke the soil, reared stone walls and a house, and planted apple trees. And already the site of the house is undiscoverable, the location of the stone walls may be deduced from the configuration of the landscape, and I am renewing the battle, putting in angora goats to browse away the brush that has overrun Haska's clearing and choked Haska's apple trees to death. So I, too, scratch the land with my brief endeavour and flash my name across a page of legal script ere I pass and the page grows musty. — Jack London

These are maybe the most exciting stars, those just above where sky meets land and ocean, because we so seldom see them, blocked as they usually are by atmosphere ... and, as I grow more and more accustomed to the dark, I realize that what I thought were still clouds straight overhead aren't clearing and aren't going to clear, because these are clouds of stars, the Milky Way come to join me. There's the primal recognition, my soul saying, yes, I remember. — Paul Bogard

Being on the frontier, as I've said, required doing rather than imagining: clearing land, building shelter, obtaining food supplies. Frontiers test ideologies like nothing else. There is no time for the theoretical. That, ultimately, is why America has not been friendly to communism, fascism, or other, more benign forms of utopianism. Idealized concepts have rarely taken firm root in America, and so intellectuals have had to look to Europe for inspiration. People here are too busy making money - an extension, of course, of the frontier ethos, with its emphasis on practical initiative. — Robert D. Kaplan

As far as I understand, the Second Coming is already here. It's a consciousness. It is not someone who is going to arrive and land in a clearing in the forest. The Hell that they talk of is going to be people creating their own unhappiness, a Hell on Earth. — Jane Siberry

I grew up in central Florida in the nineteen-sixties, barefoot half the time and running around the orange groves where my father worked. I remember flocks of white birds that would lift from the backs of cattle, disturbed by the jackhammers and bulldozers clearing land for Walt Disney World. — Anne Hull

If it were anyone else, I would choose to step back and turn away right now. I would never bow my head and push through that wattle, and its golden orbs would never shake loose and nestle in my hair like confetti. I would never grab at its rough trunk to save me from tripping. I would never part its locks of foliage. And I would never lift my head to see this neat clearing of land. I would never look past Jasper Jones to reveal his secret. But I don't turn back. I stay. I follow Jasper Jones. And I see it. — Craig Silvey

On impulse, I go round the small clearing, picking up all the trash, working with a burst of energy. There isn't a rubbish bin, but I gather it together and put it next to a large rock. My life might be a mess, but I can clear a patch of land, at least. — Sophie Kinsella

The mode of clearing and planting is to fell the trees, and burn once what will burn, then cut them up into suitable lengths, rollinto heaps, and burn again; then, with a hoe, plant potatoes where you can come at the ground between the stumps and charred logs; for a first crop the ashes suffice for manure, and no hoeing being necessary the first year. In the fall, cut, roll, and burn again, and so on, till the land is cleared; and soon it is ready for grain, and to be laid down. — Henry David Thoreau

point of view, so there is no use in discussing it. Now please forget all about it, and consider me at your service concerning this . . . this project of yours. I know more about cocoanut-planting than you do. You speak like a capitalist. I don't know how much money you have, but I don't fancy you are rolling in wealth, as you Americans say. But I do know what it costs to clear land. Suppose the government sells you Pari-Sulay at a pound an acre; clearing will cost you at least four pounds more; that is, five pounds for four hundred acres, or, say, ten thousand dollars. Have you that much?" She was keenly interested, and he could see that the previous clash between them was already forgotten. Her disappointment was plain as she confessed: "No; I haven't quite eight — Jack London