Quote

The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land, but not by the land.

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
Dance
Sought
Theater
Farms
Land
Hundreds
Nightly
Live
Owners
Enacted
Entertainment
Theaters
Sky
Harbor
Illusion
Harbors
Drama
Sigh

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Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm.
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The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills. They represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave those rewards and penalties, for wise and foolish acts against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.
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Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them
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The rich diversity of the world's cultures reflects a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth.
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Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.
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Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.
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All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.
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We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.
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We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses
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Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet one need only own a shovel.
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Time was when education moved toward soil, not away from it.
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How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook!
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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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Two things hold promise of improving those lights. One is to apply science to land-use. The other is to cultivate a love of country a little less spangled with stars, and a little more imbued with that respect for mother-earth - the lack of which is, to me, the outstanding attribute of the machine-age.
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The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts
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Agricultural science is largely a race between the emergence of new pests and the emergence of new techniques for their control.
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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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No farmer-sportsman group is stronger than the ties of mutual confidence and enthusiasm which bind its members.
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On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.
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Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.
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