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We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
Aldo Leopold
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Aldo Leopold
Age: 60 †
Born: 1887
Born: January 1
Died: 1948
Died: January 1
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Burlington
Iowa
Aldo Starker Leopold
Rand Aldo Leopold
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More quotes by Aldo Leopold
Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.
Aldo Leopold
Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them
Aldo Leopold
If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.
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
Our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides, but they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history, to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
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Twenty centuries of 'progress' have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account, and a high opinion of himself, but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment, nor a conviction that such capacity, rather than such density, is the true test of whether he is civilized.
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There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.
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Wilderness, then, assumes unexpected importance as a laboratory for the study of land - health.
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It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.
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Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.
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Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism.
Aldo Leopold
For unnumbered centuries of human history the wilderness has given way. The priority of industry has become dogma. Are we as yet sufficiently enlightened to realize that we must now challenge that dogma, or do without our wilderness? Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
Aldo Leopold
Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.
Aldo Leopold
Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven one may never get there.
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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
The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills. They represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave those rewards and penalties, for wise and foolish acts against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.
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O, God assist our side: at least, avoid assisting the enemy and leave the rest to me
Aldo Leopold
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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The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry. The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playing swirls, and the wind hurries on.... A tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind.
Aldo Leopold
It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines... a curious transfusion of courage.
Aldo Leopold