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The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.

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
Piece
Pieces
Land
History
Live
Spoiling
Human
Oldest
Humans
Task
Without
Tasks

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Science contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world. Its great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view. This means doubting everything except facts it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may.
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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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Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches.
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The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.
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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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Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.
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The only true development in American recreational resources is the development of the perceptive faculty in Americans. All of the other acts we grace by that name are, at best, attempts to retard or mask the process of dilution.
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No farmer-sportsman group is stronger than the ties of mutual confidence and enthusiasm which bind its members.
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There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.
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O, God assist our side: at least, avoid assisting the enemy and leave the rest to me
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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.
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Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow.
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The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts
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Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven one may never get there.
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Time was when education moved toward soil, not away from it.
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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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When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.
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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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Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.
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Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm.
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