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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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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
Long
Objectively
Howl
Wolf
Conservation
Mountain
Lived
Listen
Enough

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All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.
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Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.
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Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.
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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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There can be no doubt that a society rooted in the soil is more stable than one rooted in pavements.
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I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.
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We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses
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There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.
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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 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 hope of the future lies not in curbing the influence of human occupancy - it is already too late for that - but in creating a better understanding of the extent of that influence and a new ethic for its governance.
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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.
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Man brings all things to the test of himself, and this is notably true of lightning.
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There is, as yet, no sense of pride in the husbandry of wild plants and animals, no sense of shame in the proprietorship of a sick landscape. We tilt windmills in behalf of conservation in convention halls and editorial offices, but on the back forty we disclaim even owning a lance.
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Teach the student to see the land, understand what he sees, and enjoy what he understands.
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All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.
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What a dull world if we knew all about geese!
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Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.
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Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
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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.
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