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.

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

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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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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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It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines... a curious transfusion of courage.
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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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We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.
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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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Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.
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It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.
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There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.
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Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.
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Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.
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There can be no doubt that a society rooted in the soil is more stable than one rooted in pavements.
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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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Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education.
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But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. . . . Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.
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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 will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.
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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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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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