Aldo Leopold Quotes
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.
We abuse land because we see 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.
Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.
Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow… the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.
To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
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.
The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plans, and animals.
Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. 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.
A crude age must learn the crudeness of destroying.
We grieve only for what we know.
I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals.
Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence or caution.
When the land does well for its owner, and the owner does well by his land—when both end up better by reason of their partnership—then we have conservation.
The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: ‘What good is it?’
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.
We shall never achieve harmony with the land, anymore than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations, the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.
Facts of soil productivity confront our generation with new challenges.
To be whole-hearted is to bring all the lusters of the spirit into play interpretatively, to maintain bodily functions at peak efficiency, to be sensitive for all hands and to swing the intellectual consciousness to fullest compass.
The farmer cannot farm without killing things, any more than people can live without killing.
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
An individual’s physical and/or spiritual well-being depends on the state of health of the many farmland parts.
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
The thing we all scrimp, save, and work our heads off for is the time to enjoy ourselves.
The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.
Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relation with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim.
A shack gives you the illusion of the great outdoors, while conveniently sheltering you from the wind, the rain, and the insects.
What appears in this book is a sample only of an opinionated pack rat of nature lore who has been tinkering with words in behalf of his own sanity, and who, now that words have become his profession, has even meddled to the point of writing a book.
Artifacts are vital; they give definition to our collective memory.
Ethics is a human concern. Human behavior toward land is fundamentally ethical in its functioning.
To be whole-hearted is a prerequisite to understanding the whole.
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?’
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.
Splendid as the land ethic may be philosophically, a world that values wilderness conservation as much as the Supreme Court of the United States does music is a world for the future, not a place for the present.
Centralization of power in vast urban hierarchies of town, municipality, state, and nation is necessary only if our purposes are to compete, to administer affairs, or to grow economically.
Like the Leopold Music of the United States, the future wilderness may be preserved only in pockets of a larger and complex road map, with no particular trajectory.
Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how.
We do not, then, live by economics alone.
We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time.
The most intriguing reality of the wilderness idea is that it has evolved on a thousand scattered fronts, none of which has any agreed-upon final reality.
To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
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.
Ingredients for a land ethic are simple: soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
We need to develop more environmental angels.
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.