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That dark laboratory we call the soil.
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
Dark
Laboratory
Soil
Call
More quotes by Aldo Leopold
The art of land doctoring is being practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born.
Aldo Leopold
Twenty centuries of 'progress' have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account, and a high opinion of himself, but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment, nor a conviction that such capacity, rather than such density, is the true test of whether he is civilized.
Aldo Leopold
The life of every river sings its own song, but in most the song is long marred by the discords of misuse.
Aldo Leopold
In that year [1865] John Muir offered to buy from his brother ... a sanctuary for the wildflowers that had gladdened his youth. His brother declined to part with the land, but he could not suppress the idea: 1865 still stands in Wisconsin history as the birth-year of mercy for things natural, wild, and free.
Aldo Leopold
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.
Aldo Leopold
Our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides, but they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history, to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
Aldo Leopold
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.
Aldo Leopold
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.
Aldo Leopold
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.
Aldo Leopold
We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.
Aldo Leopold
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
Aldo Leopold
It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it
Aldo Leopold
Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven one may never get there.
Aldo Leopold
Wilderness is a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks' pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.
Aldo Leopold
We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all.
Aldo Leopold
Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.
Aldo Leopold
I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end result of a life journey.
Aldo Leopold
No farmer-sportsman group is stronger than the ties of mutual confidence and enthusiasm which bind its members.
Aldo Leopold
Six days shalt thou paddle and pack, but on the seventh thou shall wash thy socks.
Aldo Leopold
To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs.
Aldo Leopold
