Quote

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.

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
Grace
Retard
Name
Attempts
Names
Mask
American
Faculty
Process
Acts
True
Resources
Dilution
Best
Americans
Recreational
Development
Perceptive

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.
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There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.
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We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.
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Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.
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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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Hydrologists have demonstrated that the meanderings of a creek are a necessary part of the hydrologic functioning. The flood plain belongs to the river. The ecologist sees clearly that for similar reasons we can get along with less channel improvement on Round River.
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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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If in a city we had six vacant lots available to the youngsters of a certain neighborhood for playing ball, it might be development to build houses on the first, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, and even the fifth, but when we build houses on the last one, we forget what houses are for.
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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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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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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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What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
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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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Patriotism requires less and less of making the eagle scream, but more and more of making him think.
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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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I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creel, but my memory.
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Teach the student to see the land, understand what he sees, and enjoy what he understands.
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Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.
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We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses
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O, God assist our side: at least, avoid assisting the enemy and leave the rest to me
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