Aldo Leopold Quotes

182 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

Aldo Leopold
To any one for whom wild things are something more than a pleasant diversion, (conservation) constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution.

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

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
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
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.

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

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
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
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
Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.

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.

Aldo Leopold
We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.

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
If science cannot lead us to wisdom as well as power, it is surely no science at all.

Aldo Leopold
The watershed work of the future belongs quite as much to the forester as to the hydrographer and engineer.

Aldo Leopold
Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.

Aldo Leopold
We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all.

Aldo Leopold
Never did we plan the morrow, for we had learned that in the wilderness some new and irresistible distraction is sure to turn up each day before breakfast. Like the river, we were free to wander.

Aldo Leopold