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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.

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
Tree
Forests
Shovel
Example
Acts
Shovels
Nature
Gods
Ordinarily
Need
Plant
Pine
Needs
Neither
Restriction
Garden
Reserved
Poet
Folk
Circumvent
Creation
Poets
Humbler

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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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Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.
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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 only true development in American recreational resources is the development of the perceptive faculty in Americans. All of the other acts we grace by that name are, at best, attempts to retard or mask the process of dilution.
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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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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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If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left worth fighting for.
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The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills. They represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave those rewards and penalties, for wise and foolish acts against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.
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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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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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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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The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.
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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 shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations, the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.
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Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.
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To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
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In farm country, the plover has only two real enemies: the gully and the drainage ditch. Perhaps we shall one day find that these are our enemies, too.
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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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Time was when education moved toward soil, not away from it.
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Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.
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