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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
Society
Pavements
Pavement
Stable
Rooted
Soil
Doubt

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The worthiness of any cause is not measured by its clean record, but by its readiness to see the blots when they are pointed out, and to change its mind.
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There are idle spots on every farm, and every highway is bordered by an idle strip as long as it is keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen.
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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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Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.
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Our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides, but they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history, to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
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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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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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Mechanized recreation already has seized nine-tenths of the woods and mountains a decent respect for minorities should dedicate the other tenth to wilderness.
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Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow... the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.
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No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.
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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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It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.
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The art of land doctoring is being practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born.
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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.
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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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Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism.
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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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How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook!
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Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
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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.
Aldo Leopold