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

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of his land.
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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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Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.
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That the situation appears hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.
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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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Wilderness is a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks' pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.
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Teach the student to see the land, understand what he sees, and enjoy what he understands.
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In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.
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The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts
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Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.
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Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven one may never get there.
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We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all.
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There is yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.
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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 last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?
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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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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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There are idle spots on every farm, and every highway is bordered by an idle strip as long as it is keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen.
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Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.
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One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.
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