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One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.

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
Rivers
Environment
Education
Alone
Ecological
Lives
Conservation
World
Penalties
Wounds
Environmental

More quotes by 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.
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It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it
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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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Bread and beauty grow best together. Their harmonious integration can make farming not only a business but an art the land not only a food-factory but an instrument for self-expression, on which each can play music to his own choosing.
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Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm.
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In farm country, the plover has only two real enemies: the gully and the drainage ditch. Perhaps we shall one day find that these are our enemies, too.
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It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.
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We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.
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Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow of jewels.
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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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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?
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That dark laboratory we call the soil.
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Wilderness, then, assumes unexpected importance as a laboratory for the study of land - health.
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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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A land ethic...reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.
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For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.
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There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.
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We Americans, in most states at least, have not yet experienced a bear-less, eagle-less, cat- less, wolf-less woods. Germany strove for maximum yields of both timber and game and got neither.
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I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush and it is the same river who before I can bring my friends to view his work erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind's eye.
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Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.
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