Aldo Leopold Quotes
-
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.
→ -
The life of every river sings its own song, but in most the song is long marred by the discords of misuse.
→ -
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.
→ -
The good life of any river may depend on the perception of its music; and the preservation of some music to perceive.
→ -
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.
→ -
Like all real treasures of the mind, perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas.
→ -
Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.
→ -
In country, as in people, a plain exterior often conceals hidden riches, to perceive which requires much living in and with.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them
→ -
Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.
→ -
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. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau's dictum: In wilderness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.
→ -
Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
→ -
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.
→ -
Barring love and war, few enterprises are undertaken with such abandon, or by such diverse individuals, or with so paradoxical a mixture of appetite and altruism, as that group of avocations known as outdoor recreation. 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?
→ -
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.
→ -
When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: He could plant a tree. And 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.
→ -
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.
→ -
It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it
→ -
To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.
→ -
He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowing. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.
→ -
Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.
→ -
One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.
→ -
The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills. They represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave those rewards and penalties, for wise and foolish acts against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.
→ -
Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.
→ -
The hope of the future lies not in curbing the influence of human occupancy - it is already too late for that - but in creating a better understanding of the extent of that influence and a new ethic for its governance.
→ -
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.
→ -
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
→ -
The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.
→
Related Authors
-
-
Garrett Hardin Ecologist -
John Muir Author -
Ansel Adams Photographer -
-
Sigurd F. Olson Author -
Edward Abbey Author -
Theodore Roosevelt 26th U.S. President -
Rachel Carson Marine biologist -
-
David R. Brower Environmentalist -
E. O. Wilson Biologist -
Wallace Stegner Historian -
Harvey Broome Writer -
Wendell Berry Novelist -
Henry David Thoreau Author -
Gifford Pinchot Former Governor of Pennsylvania -
Gaylord Nelson Former United States Senator -
Peter Singer Philosopher -
Annie Dillard Author