“As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world – that is the myth of the atomic age – as in being able to remake ourselves.” Mahatma Gandhi

Earlier this month many of us, delighting in the tradition of fresh starts, aligned the 1^st of January with change in our lives. Some of us, with conviction, decided to cut sugar from our diets. Others saw the beginning of the Gregorian calendar as an opportunity for liberation from nicotine. Some chose unselfish goals that would positively affect the planet, like smiling more, eliminating a dependency on plastic, and committing to knowing exactly where the food we eat comes from.

Others, like National Geographic #Okavango15 expedition leader Dr. Steve Boyes, have decided that regardless of the day or the month, they will not rest until the Earth’s great wildernesses are afforded the protection they need.

You are reading this article because you love the wildlife on your planet. If everyone reading this committed to one small positive change they would make this year to our world, we might have over 100 000 positive changes…and that’s a good wave to ride.

Please share this with a loved one you think might appreciate it. Wishing you, your intentions, and your planet all the best for 2015.

Submit your best photographs from the wildest places to the Ranger Diaries website, and they may be featured in the “Top 25 Photographs from the Wilderness”.

Learn more about the Okavango Wilderness Project and the 700 mile National Geographic expedition along the length of the Okavango River here.

“The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature.” Edward Abbey

“I am indeed a king, because I know how to rule myself.” Pietro Aretino

“When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.” Henry Beston

“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” Abraham Lincoln

“If we study Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment — giving to that word its exact significance.” Honoré de Balzac

“Solitude is the great teacher, and to learn its lessons you must pay attention to it.”  Deepak Chopra

“Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.” Wendell Berry

“One of the hardest lessons we have to learn in this life, and one that many persons never learn, is to see the divine, the celestial, the pure, in the common, the near at hand – to see that heaven lies about us here in this world.” John Burroughs

“Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.” Anne Frank

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe”, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.” Albert Einstein

“Remember that when you leave this earth you can take with you nothing that you have received, only what you have given” Francis of Assisi 

“The spectacle of Nature is always new, for she is always renewing the spectators. Life is her most exquisite invention; and death is her expert contrivance to get plenty of life.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Nature is ever making signs to us, she is ever whispering to us the beginnings of her secrets; the scientific man must ever be on the watch, ready at once to lay hold of Nature’s hint, however small, to listen to her whisper, however low.” Sir Michael Foster

” All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.” Marie Curie

“In Nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it, and over it.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“As long as people inquire, they will find opportunities to know more upon these topics than those who have gone before them, so inexhaustibly rich is nature in the innermost diversity of her treasures of beauty, order and intelligence.” Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Edward Abbey

“If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.” Lyndon B. Johnson

“These are islands in time — with nothing to date them on the calendar of mankind. In these areas it is as though a person were looking backward into the ages and forward untold years. Here are bits of eternity, which have a preciousness beyond all accounting.” Harvey Broome

“The Earth does not belong to us. We belong to the Earth.” Chief Seattle

“The wilderness is a place of rest — not in the sense of being motionless, for the lure, after all, is to move, to round the next bend. The rest comes in the isolation from distractions, in the slowing of the daily centrifugal forces that keep us off balance.” David Douglas 

“I held a blue flower in my hand, probably a wild aster, wondering what its name was, and then thought that human names for natural things are superfluous. Nature herself does not name them. The important thing is to know this flower, look at its color until the blends becomes as real as a keynote of music. Look at the exquisite yellow flowerettes at the center, become very small with them. Be the flower, be the trees, the blowing grasses. Fly with the birds, jump with a squirrel!” Sally Carrighar

“Walk as if you were kissing the Earth with your feet” Thich Nhat Hanh

“Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.”  Lao Tzu

“Be the change you wish to see in the world” Mahatma Ghandi

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