Quote

The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.

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
Lying
Values
Rather
Boone
Future
Daniel
Even
Richest
Wilderness
Present
Days

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Our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides, but they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history, to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
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That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.
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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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Ideas, like men, can become dictators. We Americans have so far escaped regimentation by our rulers, but have we escaped regimentation by our own ideas? I doubt if there exists today a more complete regimentation of the human mind than that accomplished by our self-imposed doctrine of ruthless utilitarianism.
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To look into the eyes of a wolf is to see your own soul - hope you like what you see.
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The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry. The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playing swirls, and the wind hurries on.... A tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind.
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All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.
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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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That dark laboratory we call the soil.
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Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of.
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All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.
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If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left worth fighting for.
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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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In country, as in people, a plain exterior often conceals hidden riches, to perceive which requires much living in and with.
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Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.
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Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.
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It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.
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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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Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.
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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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