Aldo Leopold
Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.Collection: Education
Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.Collection: Environmental
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.Collection: Anniversary
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.Collection: Respect
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.Collection: Beauty
Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.Collection: Environmental
One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.
To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
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.
Recreational development is a job not of building roads into the lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.
Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.
Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.Collection: Animal
Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.Collection: Behavior
The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.Collection: Land
In wildness is the salvation of the world.Collection: World
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.Collection: Life
The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the partsCollection: Funny
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.Collection: Nature
Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.Collection: Conservation
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.Collection: Integrity
The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Lying
Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Believe
To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Respect
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.Collection: Hunting
Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Rivers
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.Collection: Nature
Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Land
Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.Collection: Men
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!Collection: Hunting
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.Collection: Land
We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.Collection: Have Faith
If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left worth fighting for.Collection: Fighting
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.Collection: Fall
It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.Collection: Poor
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.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Land
Your woodlot is, in fact, an historical document which faithfully records your personal philosophy.Collection: Philosophy
The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.Collection: Life
Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Beautiful
The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education.Collection: Land
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.Collection: Men