Quote

Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism.

Aldo Leopold

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
People
Healthy
Regions
Sample
Conditions
Wilderness
Representative
Land
Originals
Retain
Study
Original
Sciences
Understand
Condition
Region
Science
Doctors
Representatives
Samples
Must
Serve
Mechanism
Normality
Every
Disease
Disorder
Disorders

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

Image
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.
Aldo Leopold
Image
It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.
Aldo Leopold
Image
I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.
Aldo Leopold
Image
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.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Our children are our signature to the roster of history our land is merely the place our money was made. There is as yet no social stigma in the possession of a gullied farm, a wrecked forest, or a polluted stream, provided the dividends suffice to send the youngsters to college. Whatever ails the land, the government will fix it.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Relegating conservation to government is like relegating virtue to the Sabbath. Turns over to professionals what should be daily work of amateurs .
Aldo Leopold
Image
The road to conservation is paved with good intentions that often prove futile, or even dangerous, due to a lack of understanding of either land or economic land use.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Science contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world. Its great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view. This means doubting everything except facts it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may.
Aldo Leopold
Image
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
Image
Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.
Aldo Leopold
Image
That dark laboratory we call the soil.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
Aldo Leopold
Image
...to any one for whom wild things are something more than a pleasant diversion, (conservation) constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution.
Aldo Leopold
Image
The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.
Aldo Leopold
Image
To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
Aldo Leopold
Image
In country, as in people, a plain exterior often conceals hidden riches, to perceive which requires much living in and with.
Aldo Leopold
Image
To those who know the speech of hills and rivers straightening a stream is like shipping vagrants—a very successful method of passing trouble from one place to the next. It solves nothing in any collective sense.
Aldo Leopold
Image
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.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Whoever invented the word 'grace' must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Twenty centuries of 'progress' have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account, and a high opinion of himself, but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment, nor a conviction that such capacity, rather than such density, is the true test of whether he is civilized.
Aldo Leopold