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If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.

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
Part
Tinkering
Whole
Cogs
Every
Precaution
Good
Conservation
Mechanism
Land
Whether
Understand

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Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches.
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The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
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Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of.
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Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.
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Our remnants of wilderness will yield bigger values to the nation's character and health than they will to its pocketbook, and to destroy them will be to admit that the latter are the only values that interest us.
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All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.
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What more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and by cautious experimentation to prove how it works. What more substantial service to conservation than to practice it on one's own land?
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I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.
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A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
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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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. . . perhaps our grandsons, having never seen a wild river, will never miss the chance to set a canoe in singing waters . . . glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in.
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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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Our children are our signature to the roster of history our land is merely the place our money was made. There is as yet no social stigma in the possession of a gullied farm, a wrecked forest, or a polluted stream, provided the dividends suffice to send the youngsters to college. Whatever ails the land, the government will fix it.
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It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it
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To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste to others, the most valuable part.
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One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.
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The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress our opponents do not.
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I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
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A river or stream is a cycle of energy from sun to plants to insects to fish. It is a continuum broken only by humans.
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Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them
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