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There can be no doubt that a society rooted in the soil is more stable than one rooted in pavements.

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
Rooted
Soil
Doubt
Society
Pavements
Pavement
Stable

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Never did we plan the morrow, for we had learned that in the wilderness some new and irresistible distraction is sure to turn up each day before breakfast. Like the river, we were free to wander.
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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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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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Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.
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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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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.
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For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.
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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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Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.
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All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.
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But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. . . . Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.
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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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Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
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We face the question whether a still higher standard of living is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.
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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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It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines... a curious transfusion of courage.
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Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.
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There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.
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In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.
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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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