Quote

All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.

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
Enough
Defeating
Must
Wildness
Conservation
Cherish
Wilderness
Seen
Left
Self
Fondle

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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This whole effort to rebuild and stabilize a countryside is not without its disappointments and mistakes... What matter though these temporary growing pains when one can cast his eye upon the hills and see hard-boiled farmers who have spent their lives destroying land now carrying water by hand to their new plantations
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Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important.
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The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations
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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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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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The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowing. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.
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In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries no man can ignore all of them.
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At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.
Aldo Leopold
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Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.
Aldo Leopold
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Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal.
Aldo Leopold
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When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.
Aldo Leopold
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Six days shalt thou paddle and pack, but on the seventh thou shall wash thy socks.
Aldo Leopold
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Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.
Aldo Leopold
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There can be no doubt that a society rooted in the soil is more stable than one rooted in pavements.
Aldo Leopold
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What more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and by cautious experimentation to prove how it works. What more substantial service to conservation than to practice it on one's own land?
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold