...only in relatively recent times have people decided that "because I want to" is sufficient reason for annoying others.

Management" of anything as complicated as a woods requires more humility than comes easily to our species, at least in its American incarnation.

There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.

I think people who don't know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone's interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven't been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I've never seen in the fall (I've seen them in the summer - but that's a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time.