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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.

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
Question
Minorities
Law
Opponents
Whole
Degree
Thus
Degrees
Boils
Conflict
Diminishing
Return
Returns
Progress
Minority

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The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.
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What a dull world if we knew all about geese!
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Thus far we have considered the problem of conservation of land purely as an economic issue. A false front of exclusively economic determinism is so habitual to Americans in discussing public questions that one must speak in the language of compound interest to get a hearing.
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Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow of jewels.
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The sweetest hunts are stolen. To steal a hunt, either go far into the wilderness where no one has been, or else find some undiscovered place under everybody's nose
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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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The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry. The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playing swirls, and the wind hurries on.... A tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind.
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The only true development in American recreational resources is the development of the perceptive faculty in Americans. All of the other acts we grace by that name are, at best, attempts to retard or mask the process of dilution.
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The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
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Patriotism requires less and less of making the eagle scream, but more and more of making him think.
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We face the question whether a still higher standard of living is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.
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The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community, and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people.
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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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...to any one for whom wild things are something more than a pleasant diversion, (conservation) constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution.
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It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.
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An oak is no respecter of persons.
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There are degrees and kinds of solitude. I know of no solitude so secure as one guarded by a spring flood nor do the geese, who have seen more kinds and degrees of aloneness than I have.
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Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important.
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The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts
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Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.
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