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We Americans, in most states at least, have not yet experienced a bear-less, eagle-less, cat- less, wolf-less woods. Germany strove for maximum yields of both timber and game and got neither.

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
Americans
Yield
Game
Experienced
Strove
Least
Germany
Timber
Games
Cat
Yields
Less
Woods
Eagle
States
Bear
Eagles
Neither
Wolf
Bears
Maximum

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Hydrologists have demonstrated that the meanderings of a creek are a necessary part of the hydrologic functioning. The flood plain belongs to the river. The ecologist sees clearly that for similar reasons we can get along with less channel improvement on Round River.
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The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.
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Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.
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What more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and by cautious experimentation to prove how it works. What more substantial service to conservation than to practice it on one's own land?
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There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.
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The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.
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The hope of the future lies not in curbing the influence of human occupancy - it is already too late for that - but in creating a better understanding of the extent of that influence and a new ethic for its governance.
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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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I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creel, but my memory.
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Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
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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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Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.
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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?
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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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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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. . . perhaps our grandsons, having never seen a wild river, will never miss the chance to set a canoe in singing waters . . . glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in.
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I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
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There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.
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Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.
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