Aldo Leopold was an American environmentalist, philosopher, and conservationist. His writings and work have had a lasting impact on the environmental movement and have helped shape the way we think about land, wildlife, and conservation. His words are often quoted and remembered for their insight and wisdom. Here are some of the best Aldo Leopold quotes to inspire and motivate us to take action and protect our environment.
Aldo Leopold Quotes
🟡“A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of the land.”
🟡“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.”
🟡“Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree – and there will be one.”
🟡“All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.”
🟡“Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.”
“Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.”
🟡“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.”
🟡“Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.”
🟡“Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to perserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
🟡“I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.”
🟡“Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth?”
🟡“Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.”
🟡“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?”
🟡“My favorite quote: The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land… In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.”
🟡“Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.”
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
🟡“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
🟡“Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.”
🟡“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.”
🟡“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
🟡“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: ‘What good is it?”
🟡“The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.”
🟡“There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.”
🟡“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.”
🟡“To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.”
🟡“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.”
🟡“We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.”
🟡“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”
🟡“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.”
Inspiring Quotes For Aldo Leopold
🟡“It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature. But wherein lies the goodness, and what can be done to encourage its pursuit?”
🟡“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.”
“To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
🟡“Teach the student to see the land, understand what he sees and enjoy what he understands.”
🟡“When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver – He could plant a tree. When the axe was invented, he became a taker – He could chop it down. Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants.”
🟡“That the situation appears hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.”
🟡“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.”
🟡“It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.”
We face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.”
🟡“I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
Aldo Leopold Quotes About Conservation
🟡“A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke, he is writing his signature on the face of the land.
🟡“Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen, that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.”
🟡“Conservation is a state of harmony between man and land.”
🟡“Conservation is not merely a thing to be enshrined in outdoor museums, but a way of living on land.”
🟡“Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.”
🟡“Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.”
🟡“Man always kills the thing he loves. And so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to.”
“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, ‘What good is it?’ If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good whether we understand it or not.”
🟡“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.”
🟡“There can be no doubt that a society rooted in the soil is more stable than one rooted in pavements.”
Aldo Leopold Quotes About Hunting And Wilderness
🟡“I was young then and full of trigger-itch. I thought that fewer wolves meant more deer, and that no wolves would mean hunter’s paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”
🟡“To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.”
🟡“To look into the eyes of a wolf is to see your own soul – hope you like what you see.”
One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.”
🟡“Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.”
There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of those who cannot.”
🟡“Our job is to sharpen our tools and make them cut the right way… The sole measure of our success is the effect which they have on the forest.”
🟡“All conservation of wildness is self-defeating; for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.”
🟡“Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.”
🟡“Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow… creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.
Aldo Leopold Quotes About Ethics
🟡“A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.”
🟡“All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise; that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soil, water, plants and animals, or collectively: the land.”
“Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching – even when doing the wrong thing is legal.”
🟡“It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense.”
🟡“No important change in human conduct is ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphases, our loyalties, our affections, and our convictions. The proof that conservation has not yet touched these foundations of conduct lies in the fact that philosophy, ethics, and religion have not yet heard of it.”
🟡“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.”
🟡“The oldest task in human history – to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.”
🟡“There is yet no ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it.”
🟡“We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.”
🟡“A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience – and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.”
Aldo Leopold Quotes About Doing The Right Thing
🟡“The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.”
🟡“For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.”
🟡“Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.”
🟡“Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.”
🟡“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.”
🟡“It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it.”
🟡“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, the stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
🟡“Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.”
🟡“Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.”
🟡“We shall never achieve harmony with the 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.”
Aldo Leopold Quotes on the Beauty of Nature
🟡““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.”
🟡““It is on some, but not all, of these misty autumn day-breaks that one may hear the chorus of the quail. The silence is suddenly broken by a dozen contralto voices, no longer able to restrain their praise of the day to come.”
🟡““Some paintings become famous because, being durable, they are viewed by successive generations, in each of which are likely to be found a few appreciative eyes. I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all, except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush, and it is the same river who, before I can bring my friends to view his work, erases it forever.” – August: The Green Pasture
🟡““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.” – Wisconsin: Marshland Elegy
“Whoever invented the word ‘grace’ must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.” – May: Back from the Argentine
Conservation Quotes From Aldo Leopold
🟡““Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.” – The Land Ethic
🟡““Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?” – “A Plea for Wilderness Hunting Grounds” from Aldo Leopold’s Southwest
🟡““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. I regard the present conservation movement as the embryo of such an affirmation.” – The Land Ethic
🟡““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?”
🟡““Wilderness as a Form of Land Use” from The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold
🟡““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 Sand County Almanac foreword
🟡““We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses.” – A Sand County Almanac foreword
Aldo Leopold Quotes on the Human Experience
🟡“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.” – June: The Alder Fork
🟡“My dog does not care where heat comes from, but he cares ardently that it come, and soon. Indeed he considers my ability to make it come as something magical … such faith, I suppose, is the kind that moves mountains.” – February: Good Oak
🟡“Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.” – “A Man’s Leisure Time” from Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold
🟡“Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.” – The Upshot: Conservation Esthetic
🟡“The landscape of any farm is the owner’s portrait of himself.” – “The Farmer as a Conservationist” from The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold
🟡“To the mouse, snow means freedom from want and fear. … To a rough-legged hawk, a thaw means freedom from want and fear.” – January: January Thaw
Aldo Leopold Quotes on Society and Civilization
🟡“All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.” – The Upshot: Wilderness
🟡“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.” – A Sand County Almanac foreword
🟡“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.” – A Sand County Almanac foreword
🟡“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.” – A Sand County Almanac foreword
🟡“We face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.” – A Sand County Almanac foreword
🟡“Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.” – The Upshot: Wilderness
Education Quotes From Aldo Leopold
🟡“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.”
🟡“The Farmer as a Conservationist” from The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold
🟡“Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.” - March: The Geese Return
🟡“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” – Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold
🟡“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.”
🟡“The ordinary citizen today assumes that science knows what makes the community clock tick; the scientist is equally sure that he does not.” – The Land Ethic
🟡“Perhaps the most important of these purposes is to teach the student how to put the sciences together in order to use them. All the sciences and arts are taught as if they were separate. They are separate only in the classroom. Step out on the campus and they are immediately fused. Land ecology is putting arts and sciences together for the purpose of understanding our environment.” – The Role of Wildlife in a Liberal Education
🟡“To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.- The Upshot: Conservation Esthetic
Aldo Leopold quotes from A Sand County Almanac
🟡“I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.” ― 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
🟡“To look into the eyes of a wolf is to see your own soul―hope you like what you see.” ― Aldo Leopold
🟡“There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.” ― Aldo Leopold
🟡“Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.” ― Aldo Leopold
🟡“All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.” ― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
🟡“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.” ― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
🟡“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.” ― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
🟡“Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow… creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.” ― Aldo Leopold
🟡“The boundary between tame and wild exists only in the imperfections of the human mind.” ― Aldo Leopold
🟡“Getting up too early is a vice habitual in horned owls, stars, geese, and freight trains. Some hunters acquire it from geese and some coffee pots from hunters.” ― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
Aldo Leopold Quotes About Animals
🟡“All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.”
🟡“Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.”
🟡“Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.”
🟡“My favorite quote: The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.”
🟡“Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals”
🟡“One of the anomalies of modern ecology is the creation of two groups, each of which seems barely aware of the existence of the other. The one studies the human community, almost as if it were a separate entity, and calls its findings sociology, economics and history. The other studies the plant and animal community and comfortably relegates the hodge-podge of politics to the liberal arts. The inevitable fusion of these two lines of thought will, perhaps, constitute the outstanding advance of this century.
🟡“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
🟡“The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler. … The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa.
🟡“The River of the Mother of God: and other Essays by Aldo Leopold.
🟡“There are men charged with the duty of examining the construction of the plants, animals, and soils which are the instruments of the great orchestra. These men are called professors. Each selects one instrument and spends his life taking it apart and describing its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called research. The place for dismemberment is called a university.
🟡“There is yet no ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus’ slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.
🟡“There is, as yet, no sense of pride in the husbandry of wild plants and animals, no sense of shame in the proprietorship of a sick landscape. We tilt windmills in behalf of conservation in convention halls and editorial offices, but on the back forty we disclaim even owning a lance.
🟡“This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. On a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it – a vast pulsing harmony – its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.
🟡“We realize the indivisibility of the earth – its soil, mountains, rivers, forests, climate, plants, and animals – and respect it collectively not only as a useful servant but as a living being, vastly less alive than ourselves in degree, but vastly greater than ourselves in time and space – a being that was old when the morning stars sang together, and when the last of us has been gathered unto his fathers, will still be young.
Aldo Leopold Quotes About Community
🟡“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. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the aesthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture
🟡“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.
in terms of things natural, wild, and free.
🟡“One of the anomalies of modern ecology is the creation of two groups, each of which seems barely aware of the existence of the other. The one studies the human community, almost as if it were a separate entity, and calls its findings sociology, economics and history. The other studies the plant and animal community and comfortably relegates the hodge-podge of politics to the liberal arts. The inevitable fusion of these two lines of thought will, perhaps, constitute the outstanding advance of this century.
🟡“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.
🟡“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.
🟡“The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community, and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people.
🟡“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.
🟡“When we see land as a community to which we belong,
Aldo Leopold Quotes About Environment
🟡“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.
🟡“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 regard it as a commodity belonging to us…
🟡“Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.
🟡“Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.
🟡“Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them
🟡“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
🟡“The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts
🟡“The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community, and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people.
🟡“There are idle spots on every farm, and every highway is bordered by an idle strip as long as it is; keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen.
🟡“Twenty centuries of ‘progress’ have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account, and a high opinion of himself, but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment, nor a conviction that such capacity, rather than such density, is the true test of whether he is civilized.
🟡“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.
Aldo Leopold Quotes About Nature
🟡“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.
🟡“Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel.
🟡“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us…
🟡“Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.
🟡“Every farm woodland, in addition to yielding lumber, fuel and posts, should provide its owner a liberal education. This crop of wisdom never fails, but it is not always harvested.
🟡“For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.
🟡“Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.
🟡“Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm.
🟡“High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks, and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness … A new day has begun on the crane marsh. A sense of time lies thick and heavy on such a place … 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.
🟡“I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
🟡“If in a city we had six vacant lots available to the youngsters of a certain neighborhood for playing ball, it might be “development” to build houses on the first, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, and even the fifth, but when we build houses on the last one, we forget what houses are for.
🟡“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.
🟡“It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.
🟡“Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.
🟡“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.
🟡“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.
🟡“Our grandfathers were less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by which they bettered their lot are also those which deprived us of [Passenger] pigeons. Perhaps we now grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts, that we have gained by the exchange. The gadgets of industry bring us more comforts than the pigeons did, but do they add as much to the glory of the spring?
🟡“The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts
🟡“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: ‘What good is it?
🟡“There are idle spots on every farm, and every highway is bordered by an idle strip as long as it is; keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen.
🟡“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. 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.
🟡“This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. On a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it – a vast pulsing harmony – its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.
🟡“To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
🟡“To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.
🟡“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.
Aldo Leopold Quotes About Values
🟡“Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important.
🟡“All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.
🟡“High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks, and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness … A new day has begun on the crane marsh. A sense of time lies thick and heavy on such a place … 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.
🟡“If education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new. Youth yet unborn will pole up the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or climb the Sierras with James Capen Adams, and each generation in turn will ask:
🟡“Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren’t looking.
🟡“Is it possible to preserve the element of Unknown Places in our national life? Is it practicable to do so, without undue loss in economic values? I say ‘yes’ to both questions. But we must act vigorously and quickly, before the remaining bits of wilderness have disappeared.
🟡“It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense.
🟡“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.
🟡“Our remnants of wilderness will yield bigger values to the nation’s character and health than they will to its pocketbook, and to destroy them will be to admit that the latter are the only values that interest us.
🟡“The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.
🟡“There is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called sportsmanship.
🟡“Third, there is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called ‘sportsmanship’. Our tools for the pursuit of wildlife improve faster than we do, and sportsmanship is the voluntary limitation in the use of these armaments. It is aimed to augment the role of skill and shrink the role of Gadgets in the pursuit of wild things.
🟡“When we see land as a community to which we belong,
Aldo Leopold Quotes About Virtue
🟡“A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct
🟡“Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree – and there will be one.
🟡“Relegating conservation to government is like relegating virtue to the Sabbath. Turns over to professionals what should be daily work of amateurs .
Aldo Leopold Quotes About Water
🟡“All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
🟡“Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.
🟡“Hydrologists have demonstrated that the meanderings of a creek are a necessary part of the hydrologic functioning. The flood plain belongs to the river. The ecologist sees clearly that for similar reasons we can get along with less channel improvement on Round River.
🟡“I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creel, but my memory.
🟡“Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.
🟡“The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.
🟡“Perhaps our grandsons, having never seen a wild river, will never miss the chance to set a canoe in singing waters . . . glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in.
🟡“The government tells us we need flood control and comes to straighten the creek in our pasture. The engineer on the job tells us the creek is now able to carry off more flood water, but in the process we have lost our old willows where the owl hooted on a winter night and under which the cows switched flies in the noon shade. We lost the little marshy spot where our fringed gentians bloomed.
🟡“The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community, and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people.
🟡“This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. On a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it – a vast pulsing harmony – its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.
🟡“This whole effort to rebuild and stabilize a countryside is not without its disappointments and mistakes… What matter though these temporary growing pains when one can cast his eye upon the hills and see hard-boiled farmers who have spent their lives destroying land now carrying water by hand to their new plantations
Aldo Leopold’s quotes have served as an inspiration to many and have highlighted the important role that nature plays in our lives. He believed that the proper use of the land was essential to its preservation and that we all have a responsibility to take care of it. His messages of conservation and environmental protection still resonate today and we should continue to uphold his legacy by striving to create a more sustainable future.