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

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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Our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides, but they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history, to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
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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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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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In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.
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The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education.
Aldo Leopold
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Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.
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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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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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We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.
Aldo Leopold
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One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
Aldo Leopold
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It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.
Aldo Leopold
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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Relegating conservation to government is like relegating virtue to the Sabbath. Turns over to professionals what should be daily work of amateurs .
Aldo Leopold
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To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste to others, the most valuable part.
Aldo Leopold
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For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.
Aldo Leopold
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The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress our opponents do not.
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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.
Aldo Leopold
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Wilderness, then, assumes unexpected importance as a laboratory for the study of land - health.
Aldo Leopold