Respect and Preserve the Land — Thomas Merton

Last evening I was trying to count all the deer that were up at the other end of the field from where I was …  I counted at least five of them. It is wonderful to have wild animals for neighbors, and it is a shame that people can’t think of anything better than to go and shoot them.

The lesson of that is that we Americans ought to love our land, our forests, our plains, and we ought to do everything we can to preserve it in its richness and beauty, by respect for our natural resources, for water, for land, for wild life. We need men and women of the rising generation to dedicate themselves to this. — from a letter from Thomas Merton to Jim Forest (January 7, 1964) / The Road to Joy: Letters to New & Old Friends, p. 330