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The good life of any river may depend on the perception of its music and the preservation of some music to perceive.

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
May
Music
Preservation
Good
Depend
Life
River
Perceive
Rivers
Perception
Depends

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.
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Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal.
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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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I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written'… It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.
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No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.
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Hemispheric solidarity is new among statesmen, but not among the feathered navies of the sky.
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It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines... a curious transfusion of courage.
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I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creel, but my memory.
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All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.
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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.
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I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.
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The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations
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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.
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Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.
Aldo Leopold
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Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.
Aldo Leopold
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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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We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.
Aldo Leopold
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Hydrologists have demonstrated that the meanderings of a creek are a necessary part of the hydrologic functioning. The flood plain belongs to the river. The ecologist sees clearly that for similar reasons we can get along with less channel improvement on Round River.
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The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
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When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may see it with love and respect. - Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free.
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