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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.

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
Even
Prove
Paved
Good
Dangerous
Futile
Land
Conservation
Either
Intentions
Economic
Dues
Understanding
Intention
Use
Lack
Often
Road

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.
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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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O, God assist our side: at least, avoid assisting the enemy and leave the rest to me
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The worthiness of any cause is not measured by its clean record, but by its readiness to see the blots when they are pointed out, and to change its mind.
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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.
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There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.
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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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Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.
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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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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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Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
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The good life of any river may depend on the perception of its music and the preservation of some music to perceive.
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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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A land ethic...reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.
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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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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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Wilderness, then, assumes unexpected importance as a laboratory for the study of land - health.
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Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.
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For unnumbered centuries of human history the wilderness has given way. The priority of industry has become dogma. Are we as yet sufficiently enlightened to realize that we must now challenge that dogma, or do without our wilderness? Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
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There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.
Aldo Leopold