Aldo Leopold - The River of the Mother of God

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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

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

Aldo Leopold
There can be no doubt that a society rooted in the soil is more stable than
one rooted in pavements.

Aldo Leopold
Many of the attributes most distinctive of America and Americans are the impress of the wilderness. … Shall we now exterminate this thing that made us Americans?

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
The direction is clear, and the first step is to throw your weight around on matters of right and wrong in land-use. Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays. That philosophy is dead in human relations, and its funeral in land-relations is overdue.

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
Patriotism requires less and less of making the eagle scream, but more and more of making him think.

Aldo Leopold
Bread and beauty grow best together. Their harmonious integration can make farming not only a business but an art; the land not only a food-factory but an instrument for self-expression, on which each can play music to his own choosing.

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
The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.

Aldo Leopold