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

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
Called
Men
Artifact
Hammered
Artifacts
Wilderness
Material
Materials
Civilization

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We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses
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In wildness is the salvation of the world.
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We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all.
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Like all real treasures of the mind, perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas.
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To those who know the speech of hills and rivers straightening a stream is like shipping vagrants—a very successful method of passing trouble from one place to the next. It solves nothing in any collective sense.
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The rich diversity of the world's cultures reflects a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth.
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I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
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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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Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them
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Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.
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I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush and it is the same river who before I can bring my friends to view his work erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind's eye.
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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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Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.
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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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What conservation education must build is an ethical underpinning for land economics and a universal curiosity to understand the land mechanism. Conservation may then follow.
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The life of every river sings its own song, but in most the song is long marred by the discords of misuse.
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At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.
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Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
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Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.
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Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.
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