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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
Positive
Caution
Conservation
Skill
Insight
Merely
Skills
Negative
Exercise
Abstinence

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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In farm country, the plover has only two real enemies: the gully and the drainage ditch. Perhaps we shall one day find that these are our enemies, too.
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Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
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No farmer-sportsman group is stronger than the ties of mutual confidence and enthusiasm which bind its members.
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To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
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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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Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow... the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.
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Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.
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Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven one may never get there.
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If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.
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To look into the eyes of a wolf is to see your own soul - hope you like what you see.
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A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct
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That dark laboratory we call the soil.
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The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community, and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people.
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Teach the student to see the land, understand what he sees, and enjoy what he understands.
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Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you.
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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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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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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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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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That the situation appears hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.
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