Aldo Leopold Quotes
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.
Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?
There can be no doubt that a society rooted in the soil is more stable than one rooted in pavements.
There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.
A river or stream is a cycle of energy from sun to plants to insects to fish. It is a continuum broken only by humans.
To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.
That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.
We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations, the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.
Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.
Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them
Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you.
Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.
We face the question whether a still higher "standard of living" is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.
One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.
Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.
Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven; one may never get there.
It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines... a curious transfusion of courage.
Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing.
Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.
No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.
On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.
There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.
Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education.
Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.
Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.
Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.
In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.
The road to conservation is paved with good intentions that often prove futile, or even dangerous, due to a lack of understanding of either land or economic land use.
What more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and by cautious experimentation to prove how it works. What more substantial service to conservation than to practice it on one's own land?
Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.
We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.
For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.
A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct
