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In wildness is the salvation of the world.

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
Salvation
World
Wildness

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community, and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people.
Aldo Leopold
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The road to conservation is paved with good intentions that often prove futile, or even dangerous, due to a lack of understanding of either land or economic land use.
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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...to any one for whom wild things are something more than a pleasant diversion, (conservation) constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution.
Aldo Leopold
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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?
Aldo Leopold
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It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.
Aldo Leopold
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Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow of jewels.
Aldo Leopold
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Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.
Aldo Leopold
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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?
Aldo Leopold
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Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
Aldo Leopold
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Patriotism requires less and less of making the eagle scream, but more and more of making him think.
Aldo Leopold
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Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.
Aldo Leopold
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It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.
Aldo Leopold
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Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.
Aldo Leopold
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No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of.
Aldo Leopold