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In country, as in people, a plain exterior often conceals hidden riches, to perceive which requires much living in and with.

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
Perceive
Requires
Living
Conceals
Often
Exterior
Country
Plain
Much
Riches
People
Hidden

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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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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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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No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.
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What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
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Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of.
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I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.
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The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land, but not by the land.
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If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.
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An Ecologist lives in a world of wounds.
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Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet one need only own a shovel.
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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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The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
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It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value I mean value in the philosophical sense.
Aldo Leopold
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Six days shalt thou paddle and pack, but on the seventh thou shall wash thy socks.
Aldo Leopold
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The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education.
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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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Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.
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That the situation appears hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.
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A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
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Mechanized recreation already has seized nine-tenths of the woods and mountains a decent respect for minorities should dedicate the other tenth to wilderness.
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