Quote

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

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.
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There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.
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Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
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It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it
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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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There is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called sportsmanship.
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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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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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Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.
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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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In country, as in people, a plain exterior often conceals hidden riches, to perceive which requires much living in and with.
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Our children are our signature to the roster of history our land is merely the place our money was made. There is as yet no social stigma in the possession of a gullied farm, a wrecked forest, or a polluted stream, provided the dividends suffice to send the youngsters to college. Whatever ails the land, the government will fix it.
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There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.
Aldo Leopold
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Every farm woodland, in addition to yielding lumber, fuel and posts, should provide its owner a liberal education. This crop of wisdom never fails, but it is not always harvested.
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The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler. ... The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa.
Aldo Leopold
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Wilderness is a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks' pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.
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In wildness is the salvation of the world.
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Teach the student to see the land, understand what he sees, and enjoy what he understands.
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What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
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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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