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For unnumbered centuries of human history the wilderness has given way. The priority of industry has become dogma. Are we as yet sufficiently enlightened to realize that we must now challenge that dogma, or do without our wilderness? Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?

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
Good
Become
Realize
Centuries
Might
Industry
Wilderness
Human
Realizing
Enlightened
Humans
Century
Servant
Without
Challenges
Priorities
Unnumbered
Must
Poor
Master
Sufficiently
Way
History
Challenge
Priority
Make
Given
Masters
Dogma

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A profession is a body of men who voluntarily measure their work by a higher standard than their clients demand. To be professionally acceptable, a policy must be sound as well as salable. Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.
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Hemispheric solidarity is new among statesmen, but not among the feathered navies of the sky.
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Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.
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The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?
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There is yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.
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The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts
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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.
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How would you like to have a thousand brilliantly colored cliff swallows keeping house in the eaves of your barn, and gobbling up insects over your farm at the rate of 100,000 per day? There are many Wisconsin farmsteads where such a swallow-show is a distinct possibility.
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The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
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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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In wildness is the salvation of the world.
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Bread and beauty grow best together. Their harmonious integration can make farming not only a business but an art the land not only a food-factory but an instrument for self-expression, on which each can play music to his own choosing.
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Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.
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Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.
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Twenty centuries of 'progress' have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account, and a high opinion of himself, but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment, nor a conviction that such capacity, rather than such density, is the true test of whether he is civilized.
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Is it possible to preserve the element of Unknown Places in our national life? Is it practicable to do so, without undue loss in economic values? I say 'yes' to both questions. But we must act vigorously and quickly, before the remaining bits of wilderness have disappeared.
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A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of his land.
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Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal.
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When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may see it with love and respect. - Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free.
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Time was when education moved toward soil, not away from it.
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