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Aldo Leopold Quotes
1887–1948 United States
Aldo Leopold (January 11, 1887 – April 21, 1948) was a United States wildlife biologist and conservationist. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin and is best known for his book A Sand County Almanac (1949), which has sold more than two million copies.
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87 quotes
That the situation is hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.
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.
Many of the attributes most distinctive of America and Americans are the impress of the wilderness. … Shall we now exterminate this thing that made us Americans?
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.
Conservation (1938)
We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses.
In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.
There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.
Relegating conservation to government is like relegating virtue to the Sabbath. Turns over to professionals what should be daily work of amateurs.
Lecture notes ms (1935)
An oak is no respecter of persons.
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.
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?
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.
For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.
Our new camp is on a windswept rock point. … We don't know what lake we're on, and don't care ...
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.
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.
Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
Science contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world. Its great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view. This means doubting everything except facts; it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may.
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.
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, unknowingly. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.
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