“It is difficult to appreciate the abundance of wild nature in the world we have lost. In America we can think of the pre-Columbian world of 1491. . . It is a world where nature is large and we are not. It is a world of majestic old-growth forests stretching from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, of oceans brimming with fish, of clear skies literally darkened by passing flocks of birds. As William MacLeish notes. . . the fish schooled so thickly he thought their backs were the sea bottom. Bison once roamed east to Florida. There were jaguars in the Southeast, grizzly bear in the Midwest, and wolves, elk and mountain lions in New England.”

— James Gustave Speth

The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability
2008