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

More quotes by 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.
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The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations
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Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.
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There can be no doubt that a society rooted in the soil is more stable than one rooted in pavements.
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But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. . . . Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.
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It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.
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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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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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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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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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Every farm woodland, in addition to yielding lumber, fuel and posts, should provide its owner a liberal education. This crop of wisdom never fails, but it is not always harvested.
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One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
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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.
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Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.
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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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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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Mechanized recreation already has seized nine-tenths of the woods and mountains a decent respect for minorities should dedicate the other tenth to wilderness.
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The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.
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Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven one may never get there.
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The only true development in American recreational resources is the development of the perceptive faculty in Americans. All of the other acts we grace by that name are, at best, attempts to retard or mask the process of dilution.
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