Quote

On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.

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
Sky
Begun
Spirals
Settle
Descending
Wing
Arcs
Crane
Feeding
Sweep
Marsh
Settling
Grounds
Mists
Final
Emerge
Cranes
Finals
Mist
Motionless
Wings
Lifting
Marshes

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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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Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.
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The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.
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Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.
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The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
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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.
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Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of.
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There are idle spots on every farm, and every highway is bordered by an idle strip as long as it is keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen.
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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.
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Prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind I have no hope for conservation born of fear.
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Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
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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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The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land, but not by the land.
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Hemispheric solidarity is new among statesmen, but not among the feathered navies of the sky.
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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 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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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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Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.
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We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.
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The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations
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