100 Quotes by Aldo Leopold
Aldo Leopold was a renowned American ecologist and conservationist, widely considered to be the father of wildlife ecology. He is best known for his book "A Sand County Almanac," which has become a classic in the field of environmental literature. In the book, Leopold describes his experiences managing a small farm in Wisconsin, and reflects on the importance of a healthy relationship between humans and the natural world. Leopold's ideas helped shape the modern conservation movement, and his legacy continues to inspire environmentalists around the world. (Bio)
Aldo Leopold Quotes
The modern dogma is comfort at any cost. (Meaning)
Wildlife management is comparatively easy; human management difficult. (Quote Meaning)
We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. (Meaning)
Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind. (Quote Meaning)
The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself. (Meaning)
Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow. (Quote Meaning)
There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. (Meaning)
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. (Quote Meaning)
Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.
Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.
The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. (Meaning)
In wildness is the salvation of the world.
There can be no doubt that a society rooted in the soil is more stable than one rooted in pavements.
That the situation appears hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.
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.
There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. 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.
The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?
Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.
Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. (Quote Meaning)
The hope of the future lies not in curbing the influence of human occupancy - it is already too late for that - but in creating a better understanding of the extent of that influence and a new ethic for its governance.
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.
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.
To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part. (Meaning)
Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.
Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. (Quote Meaning)
A river or stream is a cycle of energy from sun to plants to insects to fish. It is a continuum broken only by humans.
It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
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.
Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you.
I have read many definitions of what is a conservationist, and written not a few myself, but I suspect that the best one is written not with a pen, but with an axe. It is a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land.
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; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.
We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations, the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.
The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals. (Meaning)
Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. (Quote Meaning)
Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.
I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
We face the question whether a still higher "standard of living" is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.
Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them
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.
To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. (Meaning)
How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook!
One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.
Our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides, but they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history, to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.
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.
Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. (Quote Meaning)
Teach the student to see the land, understand what he sees, and enjoy what he understands.
The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts
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.
Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel.
We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.
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.
High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks, and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness ... A new day has begun on the crane marsh. A sense of time lies thick and heavy on such a place ... 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.
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.
Six days shalt thou paddle and pack, but on the seventh thou shall wash thy socks.
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.
The road to conservation is paved with good intentions that often prove futile, or even dangerous, due to a lack of understanding of either land or economic land use.
A land ethic...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.
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 less alive than ourselves in degree, but 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.
It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.
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.
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.
Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.
Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.
At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.
We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses
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.
Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal.
Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.
Your woodlot is, in fact, an historical document which faithfully records your personal philosophy.
Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.
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. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the aesthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture
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.
For unnumbered centuries of human history the wilderness has given way. The priority of industry has become dogma. Are we as yet sufficiently enlightened to realize that we must now challenge that dogma, or do without our wilderness? Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
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?
Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven; one may never get there.
He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.
Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree - and there will be one.
― Aldo Leopold Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
