Aldo Leopold Quotes & Sayings

There is value in any experience that reminds us of our dependency on the soil-plant-animal-man food chain [ ... ] Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relation with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry. Time was when education moved toward soil, not away from it. — Aldo Leopold

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. — Aldo Leopold

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. — 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

It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear. — Aldo Leopold

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. — Aldo Leopold

Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television. — Aldo Leopold

Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators ... The land is one organism. — Aldo Leopold

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

Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal. — Aldo Leopold

This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all ... On a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen ... and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it - a vast pulsing harmony - its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries. — Aldo Leopold

Never had there been so rare a day, or so rich a solitude top spend it in. — Aldo Leopold

Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a "scenic" area, he is bored stiff. If crops could be raised by hydroponics instead of farming, it would suit him very well. Synthetic substitutes for wood, leather, wool, and other natural land products suit him better than the originals. In short, land is something he has "outgrown — Aldo Leopold

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. — Aldo Leopold

My dog does not care where heat comes from, but he cares that it comes, and soon. Indeed he considers my ability to make it come as something magical, for when I rise in the coal black pre-dawn and kneel by the hearth to make a fire, he pushes himself blandly between me and the kindling splits I have laid in the ashes, and I must touch a match to them by poking it between his legs. Such faith , I suppose, is the kind that moves mountains. — Aldo Leopold

A land ethic, then, 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. — Aldo Leopold

No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions. — Aldo Leopold

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? — Aldo Leopold

We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses — Aldo Leopold

Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt. — Aldo Leopold

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. — Aldo Leopold

The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations — Aldo Leopold

I have read many definitions of what is a conservationist, and written not a few myself, but I suspect that the best one is written not with a pen, but with an axe. It is a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land. — Aldo Leopold

There are men charged with the duty of examining the construction of the plants, animals, and soils which are the instruments of the great orchestra. These men are called professors. Each selects one instrument and spends his life taking it apart and describing its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called research. The place for dismemberment is called a university. — Aldo Leopold

When we see land as a community to which we belong,
we may see it with love and respect. - Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved
by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined
in terms of things natural, wild, and free. — Aldo Leopold

Getting up too early is a vice habitual in horned owls, stars, geese, and freight trains. Some hunters acquire it from geese, and some coffee pots from hunters. — Aldo Leopold

There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why. — Aldo Leopold

Third, there is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called 'sportsmanship'. Our tools for the pursuit of wildlife improve faster than we do, and sportsmanship is the voluntary limitation in the use of these armaments. It is aimed to augment the role of skill and shrink the role of Gadgets in the pursuit of wild things. — 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

The most fun lies in seeing and studying the unknown. — Aldo Leopold

The mouse is a sober citizen who knows that the grass grows in order that mice may store it as underground haystacks, and that snow falls in order that mice may build subways from stack to stack ... — Aldo Leopold

The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers. — Aldo Leopold

They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all. — Aldo Leopold

The practices we now call conservation are, to a large extent, local alleviations of biotic pain. They are necessary, but they must not be confused with cures. The art of land doctoring is being practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born. — Aldo Leopold

There are idle spots on every farm, and every highway is bordered by an idle strip as long as it is; keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen. — 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

There are some of us who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese or wild flowers is a right as inalienable as free speech. — Aldo Leopold

We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in. — Aldo Leopold

Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest. — Aldo Leopold

The government tells us we need flood control and comes to straighten the creek in our pasture. The engineer on the job tells us the creek is now able to carry off more flood water, but in the process we have lost our old willows where the owl hooted on a winter night and under which the cows switched flies in the noon shade. We lost the little marshy spot where our fringed gentians bloomed. — Aldo Leopold

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

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a place to compete for). The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. — Aldo Leopold

There can be no doubt that a society rooted in the soil is more stable than
one rooted in pavements. — Aldo Leopold

What conservation education must build is an ethical underpinning for land economics and a universal curiosity to understand the land mechanism. Conservation may then follow. — Aldo Leopold

Barring love and war, few enterprises are undertaken with such abandon, or by such diverse individuals, or with so paradoxical a mixture of appetite and altruism, as that group of avocations known as outdoor recreation. It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature. But wherein lies the goodness, and what can be done to encourage its pursuit? — Aldo Leopold

Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. — Aldo Leopold

Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you. — 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

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

The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. — Aldo Leopold

The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community, and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people. — Aldo Leopold

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. — Aldo Leopold

Recreational development is a job not of building roads into the lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind. — Aldo Leopold

The only true development in American recreational resources is the development of the perceptive faculty in Americans. All of the other acts we grace by that name are, at best, attempts to retard or mask the process of dilution. — Aldo Leopold

Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run, — Aldo Leopold

In country, as in people, a plain exterior often conceals
hidden riches, to perceive which requires much living in and with. — Aldo Leopold

I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers.
I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. — Aldo Leopold

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

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

Agricultural science is largely a race between the emergence of new pests and the emergence of new techniques for their control. — Aldo Leopold

But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy ... Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings. — Aldo Leopold

Our children are our signature to the roster of history; our land is merely the place our money was made. There is as yet no social stigma in the possession of a gullied farm, a wrecked forest, or a polluted stream, provided the dividends suffice to send the youngsters to college. Whatever ails the land, the government will fix it. — Aldo Leopold

This whole effort to rebuild and stabilize a countryside is not without its disappointments and mistakes ... What matter though these temporary growing pains when one can cast his eye upon the hills and see hard-boiled farmers who have spent their lives destroying land now carrying water by hand to their new plantations — Aldo Leopold

Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events. — Aldo Leopold

That dark laboratory we call the soil. — Aldo Leopold

In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them. — Aldo Leopold

The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land, but not by the land. — Aldo Leopold

It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense. — Aldo Leopold

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. — Aldo Leopold

Every farm woodland, in addition to yielding lumber, fuel and posts, should provide its owner a liberal education. This crop of wisdom never fails, but it is not always harvested. — Aldo Leopold

He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowing. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance. — Aldo Leopold

If education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new. Youth yet unborn will pole up the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or climb the Sierras with James Capen Adams, and each generation in turn will ask: Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren't looking. — Aldo Leopold

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, A Sand County Almanac — Aldo Leopold

Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm. — Aldo Leopold

I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush and it is the same river who before I can bring my friends to view his work erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind's eye. — Aldo Leopold

Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization. — Aldo Leopold

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. — 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

We face the question whether a still higher "standard of living" is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free. — Aldo Leopold

The boundary between tame and wild exists only in the imperfections of the human mind. — Aldo Leopold

Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? — Aldo Leopold

Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow of jewels. — Aldo Leopold

A river or stream is a cycle of energy from sun to plants to insects to fish. It is a continuum broken only by humans. — Aldo Leopold

Perhaps our grandsons, having never seen a wild river, will never miss the chance to set a canoe in singing waters ... glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. — Aldo Leopold

Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals. — Aldo Leopold

Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution. — Aldo Leopold

Bread and beauty grow best together. Their harmonious integration can make farming not only a business but an art; the land not only a food-factory but an instrument for self-expression, on which each can play music to his own choosing. — Aldo Leopold

O, God assist our side: at least, avoid assisting the enemy and leave the rest to me — Aldo Leopold

Then came the gadgeteer, otherwise known as the sporting-goods dealer. He has draped the American outdoorsman with an infinity of contraptions, all offered as aids to self-reliance, hardihood, woodcraft, or marksmanship, but too often functioning as substitutes for them. Gadgets fill the pockets, they dangle from neck and belt. The overflow fills the auto-trunk and also the trailer. Each item of outdoor equipment grows lighter and often better, but the aggregate poundage becomes tonnage. — Aldo Leopold

Two things hold promise of improving those lights. One is to apply science to land-use. The other is to cultivate a love of country a little less spangled with stars, and a little more imbued with that respect for mother-earth - the lack of which is, to me, the outstanding attribute of the machine-age. — Aldo Leopold

I am convinced that most Americans of the new generation have no idea what a decent forest looks like. The only way to tell them is to show them. — Aldo Leopold

Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry. — Aldo Leopold

The question is, does the educated citizen know he is only a cog in an ecological mechanism? That if he will work with that mechanism his mental wealth and his material wealth can expand indefinitely? But that if he refuses to work with it, it will ultimately grind him to dust? If education does not teach us these things, then what is education for? — Aldo Leopold

If in a city we had six vacant lots available to the youngsters of a certain neighborhood for playing ball, it might be "development" to build houses on the first, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, and even the fifth, but when we build houses on the last one, we forget what houses are for. — Aldo Leopold

We realize the indivisibility of the earth-its soil, mountains, rivers, forests, climate, plants, and animals-and respect it collectively not only as a useful servant but as a living being, vastly greater than ourselves in time and space-a being that was old when the morning stars sang together, and when the last of us has been gathered unto his fathers, will still be young. — Aldo Leopold

There is, as yet, no sense of pride in the husbandry of wild plants and animals, no sense of shame in the proprietorship of a sick landscape. We tilt windmills in behalf of conservation in convention halls and editorial offices, but on the back forty we disclaim even owning a lance. — Aldo Leopold

It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines ... a curious transfusion of courage. — Aldo Leopold

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. — 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

To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs. — Aldo Leopold