Leopold Aldo 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

Our remnants of wilderness will yield bigger values to the nation's character and health than they will to its pocketbook, and to destroy them will be to admit that the latter are the only values that interest us. — 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

I confess my own leisure to be spent entirely in search of adventure, without regard to prudence, profit, self improvement, learning, or any other serious thing. — Aldo Leopold

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

Mechanized recreation already has seized nine-tenths of the woods and mountains; a decent respect for minorities should dedicate the other tenth to wilderness. — Aldo Leopold

In farm country, the plover has only two real enemies: the gully and the drainage ditch. Perhaps we shall one day find that these are our enemies, too. — 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

If we lose our wilderness , we have nothing left, in my opinion, worth fighting for; or to be more exact, a completely industrialized United States is of no consequence to me. — Aldo Leopold

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

A profession is a body of men who voluntarily measure their work by a higher standard than their clients demand. To be professionally acceptable, a policy must be sound as well as salable. Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession. — 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

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

I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creel, but my memory. — Aldo Leopold

Never did we plan the morrow, for we had learned that in the wilderness some new and irresistible distraction is sure to turn up each day before breakfast. Like the river, we were free to wander. — 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

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

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

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

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

We classify ourselves into vocations, each of which either wields some particular tool, or sells it, or repairs it, or sharpens it, or dispenses advice on how to do so; by such division of labors we avoid responsibility for the misuse of any tool save our own. But there is one vocation
philosophy
which knows that all men, by what they think about and wish for, in effect wield all tools. It knows that men thus determine, by their manner of thinking and wishing, whether it is worth while to wield any. — 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

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

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. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

To look into the eyes of a wolf is to see your own soul - hope you like what you see. — Aldo Leopold

No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them. — 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

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

Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven; one may never get there. — 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

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

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

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

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

In wildness is the salvation of the world, — Aldo Leopold

Only one acorn in a thousand ever grew large enough to fight rabbits; the rest were drowned at birth in the prairie sea. It is a warming thought that this one wasn't, and thus lived to garner eighty years of June sun. It is this sunlight that is now being released, through the intervention of my axe and saw, to warm my shack and my spirit through eighty gusts of blizzard. And with each gust a wisp of smoke from my chimney bears witness, to whomsoever it may concern, that the sun did not shine in vain. — Aldo Leopold

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

What a dull world if we knew all about geese! — Aldo Leopold

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

No farmer-sportsman group is stronger than the ties of mutual confidence and enthusiasm which bind its members. — 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

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

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

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

A minimal level of sportsman ethics afield is mandated by written law. Beyond that, say, when an action is legal but ethically questionable, or when (as Aldo Leopold long ago pointed out) no one is watching, hunter ethics is an individual responsibility. As the existentialists would have it, we determine our own honor minute by minute, action by action, one decision at a time. — David Petersen

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

The Mexican gray wolves are actually responsible for the spark of legendary environmentalists Aldo Leopold and Ernest Seton. In both cases, the men found their lives and souls forever changed after they killed Mexican gray wolves. — Joy Covey

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

Hydrologists have demonstrated that the meanderings of a creek are a necessary part of the hydrologic functioning. The flood plain belongs to the river. The ecologist sees clearly that for similar reasons we can get along with less channel improvement on Round River. — Aldo Leopold

We grieve only for what we know. — Aldo Leopold

When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: He could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker: He could chop it down. Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants. — Aldo Leopold

Teach the student to see the land, understand what he sees, and enjoy what he understands. — 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

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

The river was nowhere and everywhere, for he could not decide which of a hundred green lagoons offered the most pleasant and least speedy path to the Gulf. So he traveled them all, and so did we. He divided and rejoined, he twisted and turned, he meandered in awesome jungles, he all but ran in circles, he dallied with lovely groves, he got lost and was glad of it, and so were we. For the last word in procrastination, go travel with a river reluctant to lose his freedom in the sea. — 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

Obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to the land — 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

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

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

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

That dark laboratory we call the soil. — Aldo Leopold

I love all trees, but I am in love with pines. — Aldo Leopold

If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not ... — Aldo Leopold

What the youth needs to be told is that a ship is a-building in his own mental dry dock, a ship with freedom of the seas. — 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

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

I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written' ... It evolves in the minds of a thinking community. — 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

No one would rather hunt woodcock in October than I, but since learning of the sky dance I find myself calling one or two birds enough. I must be sure that, come April, there be no dearth of dancers in the sunset sky. — 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

Camp-keeping in the Delta was not all beer and skittles. — 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

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

When I speak of knowledge of nature, I do not mean industrial science, which argues that nature is inert and can be understood only to enable humans to manipulate it. I mean that sense of nature that Aldo Leopold had in mind when he said, A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community, wrong when it tends otherwise. — Kirkpatrick Sale

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

The modern dogma is comfort at any cost. — 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