Aldo Leopold Quotes
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In that year 1865 John Muir offered to buy from his brother … a sanctuary for the wildflowers that had gladdened his youth. His brother declined to part with the land, but he could not suppress the idea: 1865 still stands in Wisconsin history as the birth-year of mercy for things natural, wild, and free.
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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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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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Six days shalt thou paddle and pack, but on the seventh thou shall wash thy socks.
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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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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.
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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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Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven; one may never get there.
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No farmer-sportsman group is stronger than the ties of mutual confidence and enthusiasm which bind its members.
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The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.
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Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.
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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.
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Many of the attributes most distinctive of America and Americans are the impress of the wilderness. … Shall we now exterminate this thing that made us Americans?
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Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
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How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! … Even so, I think there is some virtue in eagerness, whether its object prove true or false.
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Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.
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Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.
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Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. 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.
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Ideas, like men, can become dictators. We Americans have so far escaped regimentation by our rulers, but have we escaped regimentation by our own ideas? I doubt if there exists today a more complete regimentation of the human mind than that accomplished by our self-imposed doctrine of ruthless utilitarianism.
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A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than by a mob of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact.
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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?
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We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses.
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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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Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility.