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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
Aware
Land
Face
Conservationist
Faces
Humbly
Writing
Signature
Signatures
Stroke
Strokes

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I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.
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The road to conservation is paved with good intentions that often prove futile, or even dangerous, due to a lack of understanding of either land or economic land use.
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The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations
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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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Our remnants of wilderness will yield bigger values to the nation's character and health than they will to its pocketbook, and to destroy them will be to admit that the latter are the only values that interest us.
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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?
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Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches.
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Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow... the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.
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An oak is no respecter of persons.
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Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.
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The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.
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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.
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Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.
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The rich diversity of the world's cultures reflects a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth.
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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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Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.
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That dark laboratory we call the soil.
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What conservation education must build is an ethical underpinning for land economics and a universal curiosity to understand the land mechanism. Conservation may then follow.
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In that year [1865] John Muir offered to buy from his brother ... a sanctuary for the wildflowers that had gladdened his youth. His brother declined to part with the land, but he could not suppress the idea: 1865 still stands in Wisconsin history as the birth-year of mercy for things natural, wild, and free.
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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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