Quote

Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.

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
Exercise
Abstinence
Positive
Caution
Conservation
Skill
Insight
Merely
Skills
Negative

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The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling 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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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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I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.
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I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
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Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.
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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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No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.
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Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education.
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Wilderness, then, assumes unexpected importance as a laboratory for the study of land - health.
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The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.
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Your woodlot is, in fact, an historical document which faithfully records your personal philosophy.
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It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines... a curious transfusion of courage.
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The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education.
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O, God assist our side: at least, avoid assisting the enemy and leave the rest to me
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For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.
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I confess my own leisure to be spent entirely in search of adventure, without regard to prudence, profit, self improvement, learning, or any other serious thing.
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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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No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.
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Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization. Wilderness was never a homogenous raw material. It was very diverse. The differences in the product are known as cultures. The rich diversity of the worlds cultures reflects a corresponding diversity. In the wilds that gave them birth.
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