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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There are degrees and kinds of solitude. I know of no solitude so secure as one guarded by a spring flood nor do the geese, who have seen more kinds and degrees of aloneness than I have.
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The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.
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In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.
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To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
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Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important.
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Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.
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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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An oak is no respecter of persons.
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It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines... a curious transfusion of courage.
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A land ethic...reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.
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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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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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For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.
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That dark laboratory we call the soil.
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Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.
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We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.
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I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.
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We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
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Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.
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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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