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

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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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I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.
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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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Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal.
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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.
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All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.
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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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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 elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills. They represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave those rewards and penalties, for wise and foolish acts against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.
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Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of.
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There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.
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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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How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook!
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To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs.
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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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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.
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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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An Ecologist lives in a world of wounds.
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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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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.
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