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Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.

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
Evolutionary
Attainment
Animals
Highest
Animal
Social
Nonconformity

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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We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.
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Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.
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I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.
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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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Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.
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Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.
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Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree - and there will be one.
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The art of land doctoring is being practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born.
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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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Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.
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One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.
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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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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.
Aldo Leopold
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Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.
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Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.
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Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism.
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Never did we plan the morrow, for we had learned that in the wilderness some new and irresistible distraction is sure to turn up each day before breakfast. Like the river, we were free to wander.
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If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left worth fighting for.
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The road to conservation is paved with good intentions that often prove futile, or even dangerous, due to a lack of understanding of either land or economic land use.
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