Quote

Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization. Wilderness was never a homogenous raw material. It was very diverse. The differences in the product are known as cultures. The rich diversity of the worlds cultures reflects a corresponding diversity. In the wilds that gave them birth.

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
Known
Materials
Reflects
Culture
Gave
Cultures
Never
Products
Diverse
Homogenous
Men
Civilization
Wilderness
Wilds
World
Birth
Worlds
Artifact
Differences
Diversity
Hammered
Called
Product
Artifacts
Rich
Material
Corresponding

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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.
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Whoever invented the word 'grace' must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.
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At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.
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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.
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Agricultural science is largely a race between the emergence of new pests and the emergence of new techniques for their control.
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The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education.
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Six days shalt thou paddle and pack, but on the seventh thou shall wash thy socks.
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There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.
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The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?
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We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations, the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.
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The rich diversity of the world's cultures reflects a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth.
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Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.
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An Ecologist lives in a world of wounds.
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It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value I mean value in the philosophical sense.
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Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.
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Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.
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It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.
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Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important.
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We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.
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