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Aldo Leopold QUOTES

Aldo Leopold QUOTES

21 " 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

22 " The boundary between tame and wild exists only in the imperfections of the human mind. "

― Aldo Leopold

23 " Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow... creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible. "

― Aldo Leopold

24 " 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

25 " Do not let anyone tell you that these people made work of play. They simply realized that the most fun lies in seeing and studying the unknown. "

― Aldo Leopold

26 " 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

27 " The three species of pine native to Wisconsin (white, red and jack) differ radically in their opinions about marriageable age. The precocious jackpine sometimes bloom and bears cones a year or two after leaving the nursery, and a few of my 13-year-old jacks already boast of grandchildren. My 13-year-old reds first bloomed this year, but my whites have not yet bloomed; they adhere closely to the Anglo-Saxon doctrine of free, white, and twenty-one. "

― Aldo Leopold , A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

28 " One of the anomalies of modern ecology is the creation of two groups, each of which seems barely aware of the existence of the other. The one studies the human community, almost as if it were a separate entity, and calls its findings sociology, economics and history. The other studies the plant and animal community and comfortably relegates the hodge-podge of politics to the liberal arts. The inevitable fusion of these two lines of thought will, perhaps, constitute the outstanding advance of this century. "

― Aldo Leopold

29 " Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. "

― Aldo Leopold

30 " Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing. I suppose some will wish to debate whether it is important to keep these primitive arts alive. I shall not debate it. Either you know it in your bones, or you are very, very old. "

― Aldo Leopold , A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

31 " What is a hobby anyway? Where is the line of demarcation between hobbies and ordinary normal pursuits? I have been unable to answer this question to my own satisfaction. At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant. Certainly many of our most satisfying avocations today consist of making something by hand which machines can usually make more quickly and cheaply, and sometimes better. Nevertheless I must in fairness admit that in a different age the mere fashioning of a machine might have been an excellent hobby... Today the invention of a new machine, however noteworthy to industry, would, as a hobby, be trite stuff. Perhaps we have here the real inwardness of our own question: A hobby is a defiance of the contemporary. It is an assertion of those permanent values which the momentary eddies of social evolution have contravened or overlooked. If this is true, then we may also say that every hobbyist is inherently a radical, and that his tribe is inherently a minority.

This, however, is serious: Becoming serious is a grievous fault in hobbyists. It is an axiom that no hobby should either seek or need rational justification. To wish to do it is reason enough. To find reasons why it is useful or beneficial converts it at once from an avocation into an industry–lowers it at once to the ignominious category of an 'exercise' undertaken for health, power, or profit. Lifting dumbbells is not a hobby. It is a confession of subservience, not an assertion of liberty. "

― Aldo Leopold , A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

32 " 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 and Sketches Here and There

33 " 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 and Sketches Here and There

34 " To those who know the speech of hills and rivers straightening a stream is like shipping vagrants—a very successful method of passing trouble from one place to the next. It solves nothing in any collective sense. "

― Aldo Leopold , For the Health of the Land: Previously Unpublished Essays And Other Writings

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

― Aldo Leopold

36 " Unsportsmanlike predator-killing is always rationalized as defence of property—usually someone else’s property. This excuse is getting too thin to pass muster among thinking conservationists. "

― Aldo Leopold

37 " ...it is disquieting to feel that the conversion into a National Forest or Park always means the esthetic death of a piece of wild country. "

― Aldo Leopold , A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

38 " We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes "

― Aldo Leopold , A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

39 " 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

40 " The evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual as well as emotional process. "

― Aldo Leopold , A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There