Aldo Leopold Quotes

182 Sourced Quotes

I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.

Aldo Leopold
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 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
What kind of a wood lot or forest fauna can we support if every important tree species has to be sprayed in order to live?

Aldo Leopold
Prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind; I have no hope for conservation born of fear.

Aldo Leopold
Isaiah (41-9) seems to have had some knowledge of forest types and the ecological relations of species. He quotes Jehovah in this manner: "I will plant in the wilderness the cedar, the Shittah-tree [Hebrew for acaia tree], and the myrtle, and the oil tree; I will set in the desert the fir tree, the pine, and the box tree together."

Aldo Leopold
We sensed that these two piles of sawdust were something more than wood: that they were the integrated transect of a century; that our saw was biting its way, stroke by stroke, decade by decade, into the chronology of a lifetime, written in concentric annual rings of oak.

Aldo Leopold
The technical education of the American forester aims principally to teach him how to raise and use timber. This is obviously proper. Handling timber lands is his major function. But when the forester begins actual work on a forest he is called upon to solve a much broader problem. He is charged with the duty of putting land to its highest use.

Aldo Leopold
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.

Aldo Leopold
Mechanized recreation already has seized nine-tenths of the woods and mountains; a decent respect for minorities should dedicate the other tenth to wilderness.

Aldo Leopold
When the pioneer hewed a path for progress through the American wilderness, there was bred into the American people the idea that civilization and forests were two mutually exclusive propositions. Development and forest destruction went hand in hand; we therefore adopted the fallacy that they were synonymous. A stump was our symbol of progress.

Aldo Leopold
We are entrusted with the protection and development, through wise use and constructive study, of the Timber, water, forage, farm, recreative, game, fish, and esthetic resources of the areas under our jurisdiction. I will call these resources, for short, "The Forest."

Aldo Leopold
Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing.

Aldo Leopold
In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.

Aldo Leopold
One hundred and twenty acres, according to the County Clerk, is the extent of my worldly domain. But the County Clerk is a sleepy fellow, who never looks at his record books before nine o'clock. What they would show at daybreak is the question here at issue. Books or no books, it is a fact, patent both to my dog and myself, that at daybreak I am the sole owner of all the acres I can walk over. It is not only boundaries that disappear, but also the thought of being bounded.

Aldo Leopold
The only true development in American recreational resources is the development of the perceptive faculty in Americans. All of the other acts we grace by that name are, at best, attempts to retard or mask the process of dilution.

Aldo Leopold
In country, as in people, a plain exterior often conceals
hidden riches, to perceive which requires much living in and with.

Aldo Leopold
Thus far we have considered the problem of conservation of land purely as an economic issue. A false front of exclusively economic determinism is so habitual to Americans in discussing public questions that one must speak in the language of compound interest to get a hearing.

Aldo Leopold
To live in harmony with plants is, or should be, the ideal of good agriculture. To call every plant a weed which cannot be fed to livestock or people is, I fear, the actual practice of agricultural colleges.

Aldo Leopold
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.

Aldo Leopold
The life of every river sings its own song, but in most the song is long marred by the discords of misuse.

Aldo Leopold
Need we always await the willy nilly pressure of wrecked resources before professional cooperation begins?

Aldo Leopold
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.

Aldo Leopold
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.

Aldo Leopold
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.

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
It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines... a curious transfusion of courage.

Aldo Leopold
Two things hold promise of improving those lights. One is to apply science to land-use. The other is to cultivate a love of country a little less spangled with stars, and a little more imbued with that respect for mother-earth - the lack of which is, to me, the outstanding attribute of the machine-age.

Aldo Leopold
Land is soil, water, plants and animals. Each of the "organs" of land has meaning as a separate entity, just as fingers, toes, and teeth have.

Aldo Leopold
Wilderness, then, assumes unexpected importance as a laboratory for the study of land - health.

Aldo Leopold
The worthiness of any cause is not measured by its clean record, but by its readiness to see the blots when they are pointed out, and to change its mind.

Aldo Leopold