Joseph Wood Krutch

Joseph Wood Krutch (pronounced krootch) (November 25, 1893 – May 22, 1970) was an American writer, critic, pantheist, and naturalist.

Quotes

• In New England the struggle for existence is visibly the struggle of plant with plant, each battling his neighbor for sunlight and for the spot of ground which, so far as moisture and nourishment are concerned, would support them all. Here, the contest is not so much of plant against plant as of plant against inanimate nature. The limiting factor is not the neighbor but water; and I wonder if that is, perhaps, one of the things which make makes this country seem to enjoy a kind of peace one does not find elsewhere.
  • The Desert Year. University of Iowa Press. 15 April 2010. p. 23. ISBN 9781587299476.  1st edition. William Sloane Associates. 1951. 

• When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him Vandal. When he wantonly destroys one of the works of God we call him Sportsman.
  • The Great Chain of Life (1956), Chapter 9 "The Vandal and the Sportsman". Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009, p. 148.
  • Variation (Colin Fletcher, The Man Who Walked Through Time (1972), p. 230 [1]): When a man despoils a work of art we call him a vandal, when he despoils a work of nature we call him a developer.

• Outside a million windows, a million birds had sung as morning swept around the globe. Few men and few women were so glad that a new day had dawned as these birds seem to be.... We are likely to awake with an "Oh, dear!" on our lips; they with a "What fun!" in their beaks."
  • The Great Chain of Life (1956), Epilogue [2]