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Wilderness, then, assumes unexpected importance as a laboratory for the study of land - health.

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
Unexpected
Assuming
Importance
Health
Land
Study
Assumes
Laboratory
Wilderness

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: He could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker: He could chop it down. Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants.
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Is it possible to preserve the element of Unknown Places in our national life? Is it practicable to do so, without undue loss in economic values? I say 'yes' to both questions. But we must act vigorously and quickly, before the remaining bits of wilderness have disappeared.
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The road to conservation is paved with good intentions that often prove futile, or even dangerous, due to a lack of understanding of either land or economic land use.
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Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.
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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.
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Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal.
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Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.
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In farm country, the plover has only two real enemies: the gully and the drainage ditch. Perhaps we shall one day find that these are our enemies, too.
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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 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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There is yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.
Aldo Leopold
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If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left, in my opinion, worth fighting for or to be more exact, a completely industrialized United States is of no consequence to me.
Aldo Leopold
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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. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree - and there will be one.
Aldo Leopold
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If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left worth fighting for.
Aldo Leopold
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How would you like to have a thousand brilliantly colored cliff swallows keeping house in the eaves of your barn, and gobbling up insects over your farm at the rate of 100,000 per day? There are many Wisconsin farmsteads where such a swallow-show is a distinct possibility.
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It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it
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I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end result of a life journey.
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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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Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches.
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Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.
Aldo Leopold