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

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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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No farmer-sportsman group is stronger than the ties of mutual confidence and enthusiasm which bind its members.
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What conservation education must build is an ethical underpinning for land economics and a universal curiosity to understand the land mechanism. Conservation may then follow.
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I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.
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We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.
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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.
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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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He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.
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We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses
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Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.
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To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
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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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That dark laboratory we call the soil.
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One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.
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Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet one need only own a shovel.
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Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.
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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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We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.
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Every farm woodland, in addition to yielding lumber, fuel and posts, should provide its owner a liberal education. This crop of wisdom never fails, but it is not always harvested.
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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.
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