Quote

Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.

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
Civilization
Cluttered
Industry
Elemental
Relationship
Elementals
Growing
Gadgets
Support
Supports
Forget
Forgetting
Earth
Fancy
Men
Awareness
Middlemen

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I confess my own leisure to be spent entirely in search of adventure, without regard to prudence, profit, self improvement, learning, or any other serious thing.
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It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.
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The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.
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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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Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.
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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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Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.
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The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.
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I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.
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The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community, and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people.
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Your woodlot is, in fact, an historical document which faithfully records your personal philosophy.
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In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.
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To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste to others, the most valuable part.
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Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.
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In country, as in people, a plain exterior often conceals hidden riches, to perceive which requires much living in and with.
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I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end result of a life journey.
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To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs.
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There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.
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Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education.
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