Aldo Leopold Quotes

182 Sourced Quotes

We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve, but to strive. … The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of 'conservation education'.

Aldo Leopold

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. 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.

Aldo Leopold

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.

Aldo Leopold

The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only those who know the most about it can appreciation how little we know about it. 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.

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.

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

One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.

Aldo Leopold

Agricultural science is largely a race between the emergence of new pests and the emergence of new techniques for their control.

Aldo Leopold

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.

Aldo Leopold

We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses.

Aldo Leopold

It can be stated as a sober fact that the iron-heel attitude has already reduced by half the ability of Wisconsin to support a cooperative community of men, animals, and plants during the next century. Moreover, it has saddled us with a repair bill, the magnitude of which we are just beginning to appreciate. If some foreign invader attempted such loot, the whole nation would resist to the last man and the last dollar. But as long as we loot ourselves, we charge the indignity to 'rugged individualism', and try to forget it.

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

Conservation is not merely a thing to be enshrined in outdoor museums, but a way of living on land.

Aldo Leopold

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.

Aldo Leopold

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.

Aldo Leopold

A profession is a body of men who voluntarily measure their work by a higher standard than their clients demand. To be professionally acceptable, a policy must be sound as well as salable. Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.

Aldo Leopold

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?

Aldo Leopold

The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.

Aldo Leopold

We are touring the Ozarks. Here is an abandoned field in which the ragweed is sparse and short. Does this tell us anything about why the mortgage was foreclosed? About how long ago? Would this field be a good place to look for quail? Does short ragweed have any connection with the human story behind yonder graveyard? If all the ragweed in this watershed were short, would that tell us anything about the future of floods in the steam? About the future prospects for bass or trout?

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.

Aldo Leopold