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I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end result of a life journey.

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
Life
Journey
Philosophy
Results
Land
Clear
Rather
Ends
Imply
Always
Result

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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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.
Aldo Leopold
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Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.
Aldo Leopold
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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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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.
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.
Aldo Leopold
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Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches.
Aldo Leopold
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If in a city we had six vacant lots available to the youngsters of a certain neighborhood for playing ball, it might be development to build houses on the first, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, and even the fifth, but when we build houses on the last one, we forget what houses are for.
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.
Aldo Leopold
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Six days shalt thou paddle and pack, but on the seventh thou shall wash thy socks.
Aldo Leopold
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The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills. They represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave those rewards and penalties, for wise and foolish acts against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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Two things hold promise of improving those lights. One is to apply science to land-use. The other is to cultivate a love of country a little less spangled with stars, and a little more imbued with that respect for mother-earth - the lack of which is, to me, the outstanding attribute of the machine-age.
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.
Aldo Leopold
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To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste to others, the most valuable part.
Aldo Leopold
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No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.
Aldo Leopold
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It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold