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Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches.

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
Mistake
Opulence
Economists
Economist
Riches
Physical

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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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If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.
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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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It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.
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We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.
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The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations
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An oak is no respecter of persons.
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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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The life of every river sings its own song, but in most the song is long marred by the discords of misuse.
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When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.
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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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It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines... a curious transfusion of courage.
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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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A profession is a body of men who voluntarily measure their work by a higher standard than their clients demand. To be professionally acceptable, a policy must be sound as well as salable. Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.
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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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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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Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.
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Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.
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Man brings all things to the test of himself, and this is notably true of lightning.
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Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.
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