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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.

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
Needs
Neither
Folk
Loophole
Poet
Poets
Shovel
Creation
Acts
Shovels
Tree
Gods
Ordinarily
Example
Curious
Loopholes
Virtue
Plant
Pine
May
Folks
Restriction
Circumvent
Need
Rules
Reserved
Humbler

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Wilderness, then, assumes unexpected importance as a laboratory for the study of land - health.
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A profession is a body of men who voluntarily measure their work by a higher standard than their clients demand. To be professionally acceptable, a policy must be sound as well as salable. Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.
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All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.
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What conservation education must build is an ethical underpinning for land economics and a universal curiosity to understand the land mechanism. Conservation may then follow.
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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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The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts
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Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.
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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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Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.
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Hemispheric solidarity is new among statesmen, but not among the feathered navies of the sky.
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For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.
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Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.
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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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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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Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.
Aldo Leopold
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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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When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may see it with love and respect. - Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free.
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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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Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.
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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.
Aldo Leopold