Quote

Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm.

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
Keep
Utility
Nature
Furniture
Drop
Desperate
Warm
Land
Chop
Lasts
Finality
Last
Squeeze

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Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.
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It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.
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Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.
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The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler. ... The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa.
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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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We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.
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The good life of any river may depend on the perception of its music and the preservation of some music to perceive.
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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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To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
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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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Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.
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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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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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An Ecologist lives in a world of wounds.
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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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Prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind I have no hope for conservation born of fear.
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How would you like to have a thousand brilliantly colored cliff swallows keeping house in the eaves of your barn, and gobbling up insects over your farm at the rate of 100,000 per day? There are many Wisconsin farmsteads where such a swallow-show is a distinct possibility.
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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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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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...to any one for whom wild things are something more than a pleasant diversion, (conservation) constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution.
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