Quote

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.

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
Never
Hundred
Study
Salient
Learn
Intently
Facts
Dramas
Nature
Meadows
Littles
Studies
Little
Woods
Matter
Drama

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No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.
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I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written'… It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.
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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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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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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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A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct
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Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.
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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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How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook!
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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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That dark laboratory we call the soil.
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The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts
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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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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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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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Ideas, like men, can become dictators. We Americans have so far escaped regimentation by our rulers, but have we escaped regimentation by our own ideas? I doubt if there exists today a more complete regimentation of the human mind than that accomplished by our self-imposed doctrine of ruthless utilitarianism.
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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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Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization. Wilderness was never a homogenous raw material. It was very diverse. The differences in the product are known as cultures. The rich diversity of the worlds cultures reflects a corresponding diversity. In the wilds that gave them birth.
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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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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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