Aldo Leopold Conservation Quotes & Sayings

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

Thus far we have considered the problem of conservation of land purely as an economic issue. A false front of exclusively economic determinism is so habitual to Americans in discussing public questions that one must speak in the language of compound interest to get a hearing. — Aldo Leopold

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; it is such who prate of empires, political or economic, that will last a thousand years. It is only the scholar who appreciates that 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. It is only the scholar who understands why the raw wilderness gives definition and meaning to the human enterprise. — Aldo Leopold

What more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and by cautious experimentation to prove how it works. What more substantial service to conservation than to practice it on one's own land? — Aldo Leopold

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

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

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

I live my life trying to never appear to be a small man. — Julius Erving

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

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge. — Jeffery Deaver

I suspect that over time we will rely increasingly, or take notice at least increasingly, on international and foreign courts in examining domestic issues. [Doing so] may not only enrich our own country's decisions, I think it may create that all important good impression. — Sandra Day O'Connor

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

In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial. — 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

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

Relegating conservation to government is like relegating virtue to the Sabbath. Turns over to professionals what should be daily work of amateurs . — 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

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

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

Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land. — Aldo Leopold

I am asserting that those who love the wilderness should not be wholly deprived of it, that while the reduction of the wilderness has been a good thing, its extermination would be a very bad one, and that the conservation of wilderness is the most urgent and difficult of all the tasks that confront us, because there are no economic laws to help and many to hinder its accomplishment. — Aldo Leopold

To any one for whom wild things are something more than a pleasant diversion, (conservation) constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution. — Aldo Leopold

One of the advantages of being dead, I guess, is that somebody else can edit all this. — Hunter S. Thompson

As of early 2016, the sixty-two richest people in the world were worth as much as the poorest 3.6 billion people! Since the world's population is about 7.2 billion, it means that these sixty-two billionaires together hold as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humankind.37 The — Yuval Noah Harari

And a sad realization drifted through my head, something to do with how young she was, how good she looked in any light, how light didn't make the slightest difference with her. And how old I was, and how all young people, even plain young people, had begun to look beautiful to me. — Anne Rice

Prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind; I have no hope for conservation born of fear. — 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

To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part. — 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

Most people are operating out of repetition. If you come to work or school each day with the same mind-state, you probably can't get more out of it than you did yesterday. — Frederick Lenz

He [Aldo Leopold] recognized that industrial-age tools were incompatible with truly wild country - that roads eventually brought with them streams of tourists and settlers, hotels and gas stations, summer homes and cabins, and a diminishment of land health. He sort of invented the concept of wilderness as we now understand it in America: a stretch of country without roads, where all human movement must happen on foot or horseback. He understood that to keep a little remnant of our continent wild, we had no choice but to exercise restraint. I think it's one of the best ideas our culture ever had, not to mention our best hope for preserving the full diversity of nonhuman life in a few functioning ecosystems. — Philip Connors

I only have a day to give - so why can't it be a good
one? Why can't it be a shared one? Why can't I take the music of the moment and see
how long it can last? — David Levithan

Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief. — 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