Quote

Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.

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
Civilization
Called
Men
Artifact
Hammered
Artifacts
Wilderness
Material
Materials

More quotes by 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
Patriotism requires less and less of making the eagle scream, but more and more of making him think.
Aldo Leopold
Image
The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.
Aldo Leopold
Image
The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education.
Aldo Leopold
Image
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.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Science contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world. Its great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view. This means doubting everything except facts it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may.
Aldo Leopold
Image
That the situation appears hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.
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
...to any one for whom wild things are something more than a pleasant diversion, (conservation) constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution.
Aldo Leopold
Image
He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowing. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Mechanized recreation already has seized nine-tenths of the woods and mountains a decent respect for minorities should dedicate the other tenth to wilderness.
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
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.
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
The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.
Aldo Leopold
Image
There are degrees and kinds of solitude. I know of no solitude so secure as one guarded by a spring flood nor do the geese, who have seen more kinds and degrees of aloneness than I have.
Aldo Leopold
Image
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.
Aldo Leopold
Image
If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left worth fighting for.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.
Aldo Leopold