Quotes & Sayings About Nature 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature. — 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

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

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

Our grandfathers were less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by which they bettered their lot are also those which deprived us of [Passenger] pigeons. Perhaps we now grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts, that we have gained by the exchange. The gadgets of industry bring us more comforts than the pigeons did, but do they add as much to the glory of the spring? — Aldo Leopold

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

It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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