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Aldo Leopold Quotes
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To those who know the speech of hills and rivers straightening a stream is like shipping vagrants—a very successful method of passing trouble from one place to the next. It solves nothing in any collective sense.
Aldo Leopold
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No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.
Aldo Leopold
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Engineers did not discover insulation: they copied it from these old soldiers of the prairie war.
Aldo Leopold
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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.
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Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.
These things, I say, should have come to us. I fear they have not come to many.
Aldo Leopold
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Our tools for the pursuit of wildlife improve faster than we do, and sportsmanship is a 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.
Aldo Leopold
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We speak glibly of conservation education, but what do we mean by it? If we mean indoctrination, then let us be reminded that it is just as easy to indoctrinate with fallacies as with facts. If we mean to teach the capacity for independent judgement, then I am appalled by the magnitude of the task.
Aldo Leopold
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What to do? I see only two courses open to the likes of us. One is to go live on locusts in the wilderness, if there is any wilderness left. The other is surreptitiously to set up within the economic Juggernaut certain new cogs and wheels whereby the residual love of nature, inherent even in Rotarians, may be made to recreate at least a fraction of those values which their love of "progress" is destroying. A briefer way to put it is: if we want Mr. Babbitt to rebuild outdoor America, we must let him use the same tools wherewith he destroyed it. He knows no other.
Aldo Leopold
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Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.
Aldo Leopold
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Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.
Aldo Leopold
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Whoever invented the word 'grace' must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.
Aldo Leopold
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The erasure of a human subspecies is largely painless — to us — if we know little enough about it. A dead Chinaman is of little import to us whose awareness of things Chinese is bounded by an occasional dish of chow mein. We grieve only for what we know. The erasure of Silphium from western Dane County is no cause for grief if one knows it only as a name in a botany book.
Aldo Leopold
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He who owns a veteran bur oak owns more than a tree. He owns a historical library, and a reserved seat in the theater of evolution. To the discerning eye, his farm is labeled with the badge and symbol of the prairie war.
Aldo Leopold
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In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.
Aldo Leopold
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[This book] has done well to preserve this saga of how the state was made safe for cows. How the state is to be made safe from cows is a saga yet to be written.
Aldo Leopold
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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
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In country, as in people, a plain exterior often conceals
hidden riches, to perceive which requires much living in and with.
Aldo Leopold
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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
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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
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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
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The life of every river sings its own song, but in most the song is long marred by the discords of misuse.
Aldo Leopold
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Need we always await the willy nilly pressure of wrecked resources before professional cooperation begins?
Aldo Leopold
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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
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Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing.
Aldo Leopold
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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
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Quote of the day
Marriages are made in heaven and consummated on earth.
John Lyly
Aldo Leopold
Creative Commons
Born:
January 11, 1887
Died:
April 21, 1948
(aged 61)
Bio:
Aldo Leopold was an American author, scientist, ecologist, forester, conservationist, and environmentalist.
Known for:
Round River
Game management (1933)
The River of the Mother of God
For the Health of the Land
Most used words:
land
wilderness
community
conservation
man
plants
live
understand
ethic
education
economic
animals
day
love
farm
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