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We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.

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
Regard
Belonging
Green
Pollution
Respect
Preservation
Environment
Commodity
Conserving
Land
Preserves
Wildlife
Community
Wilderness
Ecology
Natural
Abuse
Sustainability
Nature
Environmental
Conservation

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal.
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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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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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That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.
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Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.
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He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowing. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.
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Whoever invented the word 'grace' must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.
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It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines... a curious transfusion of courage.
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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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One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
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Is it possible to preserve the element of Unknown Places in our national life? Is it practicable to do so, without undue loss in economic values? I say 'yes' to both questions. But we must act vigorously and quickly, before the remaining bits of wilderness have disappeared.
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Time was when education moved toward soil, not away from it.
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This whole effort to rebuild and stabilize a countryside is not without its disappointments and mistakes... What matter though these temporary growing pains when one can cast his eye upon the hills and see hard-boiled farmers who have spent their lives destroying land now carrying water by hand to their new plantations
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I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.
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Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.
Aldo Leopold
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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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Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.
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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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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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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.
Aldo Leopold