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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.

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
Shrinks
Word
Wilderness
Sense
Resources
Creation
Grow
Full
Shrink
Impossible
Resource
Grows

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Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.
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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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No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.
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In that year [1865] John Muir offered to buy from his brother ... a sanctuary for the wildflowers that had gladdened his youth. His brother declined to part with the land, but he could not suppress the idea: 1865 still stands in Wisconsin history as the birth-year of mercy for things natural, wild, and free.
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In country, as in people, a plain exterior often conceals hidden riches, to perceive which requires much living in and with.
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To those who know the speech of hills and rivers straightening a stream is like shipping vagrants—a very successful method of passing trouble from one place to the next. It solves nothing in any collective sense.
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What a dull world if we knew all about geese!
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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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That the situation appears hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.
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Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow.
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When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: He could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker: He could chop it down. Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants.
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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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Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.
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The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.
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Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.
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We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.
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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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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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The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?
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Relegating conservation to government is like relegating virtue to the Sabbath. Turns over to professionals what should be daily work of amateurs .
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