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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.

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
Land
Conservation
Education
Mechanism
Understand
Ethical
May
Curiosity
Must
Economics
Build
Universal
Follow
Underpinning

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Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.
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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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He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.
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A river or stream is a cycle of energy from sun to plants to insects to fish. It is a continuum broken only by humans.
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If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left worth fighting for.
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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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One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
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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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The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.
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He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowing. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.
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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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No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.
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The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts
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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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The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?
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There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.
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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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Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.
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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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I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush and it is the same river who before I can bring my friends to view his work erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind's eye.
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