quotes by Aldo Leopold

"There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot."
— Aldo Leopold

"Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."
— Aldo Leopold

"The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?'"
— Aldo Leopold

"There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace."
— Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac)

"I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness."
— Aldo Leopold

"The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering."
— Aldo Leopold (Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold)

"We shall never achieve harmony with the land, anymore than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve but to strive."
— Aldo Leopold (Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold)

"Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to perserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."
— Aldo Leopold

"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."
— Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac)

"One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring."
— Aldo Leopold

"We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness."
— Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac)

"One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise."
— Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac)

"What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?"
— Aldo Leopold

"We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."
— Aldo Leopold

"A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of the land."
— Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac)

"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."
— Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac)

"The modern dogma is comfort at any cost."
— Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac)

"Out of the clouds I hear a faint bark, as of a faraway dog. It is strange how the world cocks its ear to that sound, wondering. Soon it is louder: the honk of geese, invisible, but coming on.

The flock emerges from the low clouds, a tattered banner of birds, dipping and rising, blown up and blown down, blown together and blown apart, but advancing, the wind wrestling lovingly with each winnowing wing. When the flock is a blur in the far sky I hear the last honk, sounding taps for summer.

It is warm behind the driftwood now, for the wind has gone with the geese. So would I--if I were the wind."
— Aldo Leopold

"One of the penalties of an ecological education, is that one lives alone in a world of wounds."
— Aldo Leopold

"My favorite quote: The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land... In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such."
— Aldo Leopold

"Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education."
— Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac)

"All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish."
— Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac)

""On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.""
— Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac)

"Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays."
— Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac)

"Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map? "
— Aldo Leopold

"The good life of any river may depend on the perception of its music; and the preservation of some music to perceive."
— Aldo Leopold

"At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant."
— Aldo Leopold

"When I hear anyone say he does not fear lightning, I still remark inwardly: he has never ridden The Mountain in July. The explosions are fearsome enough, but more so are the smoking slivers of stone that sing past your ear when the bolt crashes into a rimrock. Still more so are the splinters that fly when a bolt explodes a pine... It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear."
— Aldo Leopold

"The government trapper who took the grizzly knew he had made Escudilla safe for cows. He did not know he had toppled the spire off an edifice a-building since the morning stars sang together. The bureau chief who sent the trapper was a biologist versed in the architecture of evolution, but he did not know that spires might be as important as cows... The Congressmen who voted money to clear the ranges of bears were the sons of pioneers. They acclaimed the superior virtues of the frontiersman, but they strove with might and main to make an end of the frontier... Escudilla still hangs on the horizon, but when you see it you no longer think of bear. It's only a mountain now."
— Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac: With Other Essays on Conservation from Round River [Illustrated])

"The government trapper who took the grizzly knew he had made Escudilla safe for cows. He did not know he had toppled the spire off an edifice a-building since the morning stars sang together. The bureau chief who sent the trapper was a biologist versed in the architecture of evolution, but he did not know that spires might be as important as cows... The Congressmen who voted money to clear the ranges of bears were the sons of pioneers. They acclaimed the superior virtues of the frontiersman, but they strove with might and main to make an end of the frontier... Escudilla still hangs on the horizon, but when you see it you no longer think of bear. It's only a mountain now."
— Aldo Leopold