Quote

How would you like to have a thousand brilliantly colored cliff swallows keeping house in the eaves of your barn, and gobbling up insects over your farm at the rate of 100,000 per day? There are many Wisconsin farmsteads where such a swallow-show is a distinct possibility.

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
Would
Keeping
Cliff
Like
Rate
Swallow
Possibility
Cliffs
Eaves
Thousand
Colored
Swallows
Show
Distinct
Barn
House
Insects
Brilliantly
Shows
Farm
Barns
Many
Farms
Wisconsin

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When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may see it with love and respect. - Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free.
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All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.
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The art of land doctoring is being practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born.
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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.
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I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end result of a life journey.
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Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education.
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Bread and beauty grow best together. Their harmonious integration can make farming not only a business but an art the land not only a food-factory but an instrument for self-expression, on which each can play music to his own choosing.
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When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: He could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker: He could chop it down. Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants.
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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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There is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called sportsmanship.
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Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.
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Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.
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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 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.
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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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Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.
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Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.
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Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.
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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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The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.
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