Quote

There is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called sportsmanship.

Aldo Leopold

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Exercise
Value
Restraints
Called
Sportsmanship
Values
Collectively
Experience
Exercises
Restraint
Hunting
Ethical

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

Image
There are idle spots on every farm, and every highway is bordered by an idle strip as long as it is keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen.
Aldo Leopold
Image
The worthiness of any cause is not measured by its clean record, but by its readiness to see the blots when they are pointed out, and to change its mind.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow of jewels.
Aldo Leopold
Image
The rich diversity of the world's cultures reflects a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth.
Aldo Leopold
Image
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
Image
There is, as yet, no sense of pride in the husbandry of wild plants and animals, no sense of shame in the proprietorship of a sick landscape. We tilt windmills in behalf of conservation in convention halls and editorial offices, but on the back forty we disclaim even owning a lance.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.
Aldo Leopold
Image
A land ethic...reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.
Aldo Leopold
Image
The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts
Aldo Leopold
Image
The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.
Aldo Leopold
Image
For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.
Aldo Leopold
Image
I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written'… It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.
Aldo Leopold
Image
There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.
Aldo Leopold
Image
When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: He could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker: He could chop it down. Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants.
Aldo Leopold
Image
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
Aldo Leopold
Image
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
Image
Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.
Aldo Leopold
Image
The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land, but not by the land.
Aldo Leopold
Image
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.
Aldo Leopold