Aldo Leopold Quotes
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To the mouse, snow means freedom from want and fear. … To a rough-legged hawk, a thaw means freedom from want and fear.
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What a dull world if we knew all about geese!
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When we hear the crane’s call we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.
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There are degrees and kinds of solitude. … I know of no solitude so secure as one guarded by a spring flood; nor do the geese, who have seen more kinds and degrees of aloneness than I have.
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That the situation is hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.
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That biological jack-of-all-trades called ecologist tries to be and do all these things. Needless to say, he does not succeed.
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There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.
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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.
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Whoever invented the word ‘grace’ must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.
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The ordinary citizen today assumes that science knows what makes the community clock tick; the scientist is equally sure that he does not.
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The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land, but not by the land.
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Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow of jewels.
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I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever ‘written’ … it evolves in the minds of a thinking community.
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The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.
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Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
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We speak glibly of conservation education, but what do we mean by it? If we mean indoctrination, then let us be reminded that it is just as easy to indoctrinate with fallacies as with facts. If we mean to teach the capacity for independent judgement, then I am appalled by the magnitude of the task.
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The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.
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One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.
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For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.
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Science contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world. Its great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view. This means doubting everything except facts; it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may.
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Six days shalt thou paddle and pack, but on the seventh thou shall wash thy socks.
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In farm country, the plover has only two real enemies: the gully and the drainage ditch. Perhaps we shall one day find that these are our enemies, too.
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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.
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Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism.