Quote

To those who know the speech of hills and rivers straightening a stream is like shipping vagrants—a very successful method of passing trouble from one place to the next. It solves nothing in any collective sense.

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
Trouble
Passings
Successful
Streams
Straightening
Sense
Hills
Vagrants
Next
Passing
Solves
Place
Rivers
Shipping
Nothing
Solve
Stream
Like
Method
Collectives
Speech
Collective

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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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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The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry. The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playing swirls, and the wind hurries on.... A tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind.
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The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.
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Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.
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Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing.
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Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
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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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One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
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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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We face the question whether a still higher standard of living is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.
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The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress our opponents do not.
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How would you like to have a thousand brilliantly colored cliff swallows keeping house in the eaves of your barn, and gobbling up insects over your farm at the rate of 100,000 per day? There are many Wisconsin farmsteads where such a swallow-show is a distinct possibility.
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...to any one for whom wild things are something more than a pleasant diversion, (conservation) constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution.
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It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.
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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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Twenty centuries of 'progress' have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account, and a high opinion of himself, but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment, nor a conviction that such capacity, rather than such density, is the true test of whether he is civilized.
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A river or stream is a cycle of energy from sun to plants to insects to fish. It is a continuum broken only by humans.
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Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.
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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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A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
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