Wallpaper

As a tribute to America's great environmental writers, we have created free downloadable backgrounds for your computer screen featuring striking nature imagery and quotations from Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, John Muir, and E. O. Wilson.

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As an entomologist with a specialty in ants, E. O. Wilson (1929-) focuses on the "microcosmos." As a writer and conservationist, his interest extends to the whole biological world, which he has brought to life in many engaging and popular books, from The Ants and Superorganism to The Creation and The Future of Life. Yet, paradoxically, his most influential verbal contribution may be the coining of a single word, biodiversity.

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To download, click the appropriate thumbnail. In the new window, right-click (PC) or ctrl-click (Mac) and save the image.

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John Muir (1838-1914) will forever be remembered for preserving Yosemite, one of the crown jewels of our national park system. He began life as a wanderer and explorer, ultimately finding and falling under the spell of the Sierra Nevada, which it became his life's work to save. He made his case in a series of beloved books in which he summoned the soul of the wilderness in vivid and poetic prose.

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To download, click the appropriate thumbnail. In the new window, right-click (PC) or ctrl-click (Mac) and save the image.

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The author and biologist Rachel Carson (1907-1964) first gained a national audience with several works on the sea, including the 1952 bestseller, The Sea Around Us. But it was Silent Spring, her earth-shaking book on the dangers of chemical pesticides in 1962, that gained her a place in history. Of her decision to write Silent Spring, she said:

"The more I learned about the use of pesticides, the more appalled I became....What I discovered was that everything which meant most to me as a naturalist was being threatened, and that nothing I could do would be more important."

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To download, click the appropriate thumbnail. In the new window, right-click (PC) or ctrl-click (Mac) and save the image.

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This wallpaper features a quotation from the man generally considered to be the father of environmental writing, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). While there were other nature writers before him, his works are perhaps the first, and certainly most eloquent, to espouse a way of living on the planet that has come to be associated with environmentalism. This approach recognizes the interconnectedness of nature; our place within, not above or outside, it; and the need to treat it with the respect and care owing to one's only home.

600 x 800

1024 x 768

1600 x 1024

To download, click the appropriate thumbnail. In the new window, right-click (PC) or ctrl-click (Mac) and save the image.