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A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

Aldo Leopold

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Aldo Leopold
Age: 60 †
Born: 1887
Born: January 1
Died: 1948
Died: January 1
Academic
Author
Botanical Collector
Ecologist
Environmentalist
Forestry Scientist
Naturalist
Philosopher
University Teacher
Burlington
Iowa
Aldo Starker Leopold
Rand Aldo Leopold
Thing
Environment
Ecology
Land
Tends
Beauty
Preserve
Community
Preserves
Wrong
Stability
Nature
Wilderness
Earth
Otherwise
Biotic
Right
Integrity
Biodiversity

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Whoever invented the word 'grace' must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.
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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.
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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.
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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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Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.
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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.
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Six days shalt thou paddle and pack, but on the seventh thou shall wash thy socks.
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The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress our opponents do not.
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Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.
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The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education.
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No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.
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Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.
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Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.
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No farmer-sportsman group is stronger than the ties of mutual confidence and enthusiasm which bind its members.
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How would you like to have a thousand brilliantly colored cliff swallows keeping house in the eaves of your barn, and gobbling up insects over your farm at the rate of 100,000 per day? There are many Wisconsin farmsteads where such a swallow-show is a distinct possibility.
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A river or stream is a cycle of energy from sun to plants to insects to fish. It is a continuum broken only by humans.
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It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it
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Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.
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For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.
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Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm.
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