-
That biological jack-of-all-trades called ecologist tries to be and do all these things. Needless to say, he does not succeed.
Aldo Leopold -
Land-use ethics are still governed wholly by economic self-interest, just as social ethics were a century ago.
Aldo Leopold
-
We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses.
Aldo Leopold -
How would you like to have a thousand brilliantly colored cliff swallows keeping house in the eaves of your barn, and gobbling up insects over your farm at the rate of 100,000 per day? There are many Wisconsin farmsteads where such a swallow-show is a distinct possibility.
Aldo Leopold -
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.
Aldo Leopold -
Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.
Aldo Leopold -
Hunting for sport is an improvement over hunting for food, in that there has been added to the test of skill and ethical code, which the hunter formulates for himself, and must live up to without the moral support of bystanders.
Aldo Leopold -
But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy.
Aldo Leopold
-
There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.
Aldo Leopold -
After describing a hopper for feeding winter game: If you think you're too old to enjoy building such contraptions - that only Boy Scouts get a kick out of such nonsense - just try it. You may end up by building several.
Aldo Leopold -
What conservation education must build is an ethical underpinning for land economics and a universal curiosity to understand the land mechanism. Conservation may then follow.
Aldo Leopold -
One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.
Aldo Leopold -
The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. … Perhaps every youth needs an occasional wilderness trip, in order to learn the meaning of this particular freedom.
Aldo Leopold -
Whoever invented the word ‘grace’ must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.
Aldo Leopold
-
My dog, by the way, thinks I have much to learn about partridges, and, being a professional naturalist, I agree.
Aldo Leopold -
Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.
Aldo Leopold -
In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.
Aldo Leopold -
Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
Aldo Leopold -
Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility.
Aldo Leopold -
Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven; one may never get there.
Aldo Leopold
-
Bread and beauty grow best together. Their harmonious integration can make farming not only a business but an art; the land not only a food-factory but an instrument for self-expression, on which each can play music to his own choosing.
Aldo Leopold -
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.
Aldo Leopold -
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.
Aldo Leopold -
Conservation is not merely a thing to be enshrined in outdoor museums, but a way of living on land.
Aldo Leopold