Aldo Leopold
At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.Collection: Hobbies
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?Collection: Priorities
Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal.Collection: Self
Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Fall
I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush and it is the same river who before I can bring my friends to view his work erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind's eye.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Land
I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Nature
It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.Collection: Nature
I am asserting that those who love the wilderness should not be wholly deprived of it, that while the reduction of the wilderness has been a good thing, its extermination would be a very bad one, and that the conservation of wilderness is the most urgent and difficult of all the tasks that confront us, because there are no economic laws to help and many to hinder its accomplishment.Collection: Law
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
We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our nosesCollection: Art
My favorite quote: The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.Collection: Animal
We face the question whether a still higher "standard of living" is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.Collection: Wild And Free
Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.Collection: New Relationship
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.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Writing
Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm.Collection: 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.Collection: Mean
The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.Collection: Ignorance
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.Collection: Land
Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with themCollection: Taken
Teach the student to see the land, understand what he sees, and enjoy what he understands.Collection: Land
Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.Collection: Doubt
He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.Collection: Spring
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.Collection: Nature
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.Collection: Rivers
An Ecologist lives in a world of wounds.Collection: World
For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.Collection: Sun
Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization. Wilderness was never a homogenous raw material. It was very diverse. The differences in the product are known as cultures. The rich diversity of the worlds cultures reflects a corresponding diversity. In the wilds that gave them birth.Collection: Men
Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow. Invasions can be arrested or modified in a manner to keep an area usable either for recreation, science or for wildlife, but the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible. It follows, then, that any wilderness program is a rearguard action, through which retreats are reduced to a minimum.Collection: Invasion
The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler. ... The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa.Collection: Real
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?Collection: Country
Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow.Collection: Wilderness
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.Collection: Nature
A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of his land.Collection: Writing
Never did we plan the morrow, for we had learned that in the wilderness some new and irresistible distraction is sure to turn up each day before breakfast. Like the river, we were free to wander.Collection: Rivers
What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?Collection: Maps
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.Collection: Nature
It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines... a curious transfusion of courage.Collection: Sometimes
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.Collection: Art
The good life of any river may depend on the perception of its music; and the preservation of some music to perceive.Collection: Good Life
We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.Collection: Long
A profession is a body of men who voluntarily measure their work by a higher standard than their clients demand. To be professionally acceptable, a policy must be sound as well as salable. Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.Collection: Men
Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches.Collection: Mistake