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A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of his land.

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
Strokes
Aware
Land
Face
Conservationist
Faces
Humbly
Writing
Signature
Signatures
Stroke

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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Like all real treasures of the mind, perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas.
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There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.
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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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But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. . . . Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.
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The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts
Aldo Leopold
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Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of.
Aldo Leopold
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There is, as yet, no sense of pride in the husbandry of wild plants and animals, no sense of shame in the proprietorship of a sick landscape. We tilt windmills in behalf of conservation in convention halls and editorial offices, but on the back forty we disclaim even owning a lance.
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Every farm woodland, in addition to yielding lumber, fuel and posts, should provide its owner a liberal education. This crop of wisdom never fails, but it is not always harvested.
Aldo Leopold
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That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.
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If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left, in my opinion, worth fighting for or to be more exact, a completely industrialized United States is of no consequence to me.
Aldo Leopold
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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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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
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Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet one need only own a shovel.
Aldo Leopold
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Whoever invented the word 'grace' must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.
Aldo Leopold
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Agricultural science is largely a race between the emergence of new pests and the emergence of new techniques for their control.
Aldo Leopold
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The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.
Aldo Leopold
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For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.
Aldo Leopold
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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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There is yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.
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If in a city we had six vacant lots available to the youngsters of a certain neighborhood for playing ball, it might be development to build houses on the first, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, and even the fifth, but when we build houses on the last one, we forget what houses are for.
Aldo Leopold