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If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left worth fighting for.

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
Fighting
Left
Nothing
Wilderness
Worth
Lose
Loses

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Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.
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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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Prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind I have no hope for conservation born of fear.
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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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We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.
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I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written'… It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.
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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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Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.
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Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them
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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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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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We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.
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To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste to others, the most valuable part.
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Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
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The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.
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Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.
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Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.
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No farmer-sportsman group is stronger than the ties of mutual confidence and enthusiasm which bind its members.
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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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Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.
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