Aldo Leopold
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.Collection: Land
The life of every river sings its own song, but in most the song is long marred by the discords of misuse.Collection: Song
The rich diversity of the world's cultures reflects a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth.Collection: Diversity
Agricultural science is largely a race between the emergence of new pests and the emergence of new techniques for their control.Collection: Race
Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven; one may never get there.Collection: Alaska
In that year [1865] John Muir offered to buy from his brother ... a sanctuary for the wildflowers that had gladdened his youth. His brother declined to part with the land, but he could not suppress the idea: 1865 still stands in Wisconsin history as the birth-year of mercy for things natural, wild, and free.Collection: Brother
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.Collection: Animal
There is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called sportsmanship.Collection: Exercise
Our children are our signature to the roster of history; our land is merely the place our money was made. There is as yet no social stigma in the possession of a gullied farm, a wrecked forest, or a polluted stream, provided the dividends suffice to send the youngsters to college. Whatever ails the land, the government will fix it.Collection: Children
Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of.Collection: America
Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism.Collection: Land
Our remnants of wilderness will yield bigger values to the nation's character and health than they will to its pocketbook, and to destroy them will be to admit that the latter are the only values that interest us.Collection: Character
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, unknowing. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.Collection: Spring
If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.Collection: Land
Whoever invented the word 'grace' must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.Collection: Wings
Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing.Collection: Art
All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.Collection: Men
It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded itCollection: Lilies
Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow of jewels.Collection: Real
If education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new. Youth yet unborn will pole up the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or climb the Sierras with James Capen Adams, and each generation in turn will ask: Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren't looking.Collection: Sorry
There is yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.Collection: Girl
Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important.Collection: Humility
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.Collection: Law
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.Collection: Country
The only true development in American recreational resources is the development of the perceptive faculty in Americans. All of the other acts we grace by that name are, at best, attempts to retard or mask the process of dilution.Collection: Names
The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.Collection: Discovery
Man brings all things to the test of himself, and this is notably true of lightning.Collection: Men
Relegating conservation to government is like relegating virtue to the Sabbath. Turns over to professionals what should be daily work of amateurs .Collection: Government
The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land, but not by the land.Collection: Drama
The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills. They represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave those rewards and penalties, for wise and foolish acts against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.Collection: Wise
Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?Collection: Might
To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs.Collection: Country
Conservationists have, I fear, adopted the pedagogical method of the prophets: we mutter darkly about impending doom if people don't mend their ways. The doom is impending, all right; no one can be an ecologist, even an amateur one, without seeing it. But do people mend their ways for fear of calamity? I doubt it. They are more likely to do it out of pure curiosity and interest.Collection: People
The most important characteristic of an organism is that capacity for internal self-renewal known as health. There are two organisms whose processes of self-renewal have been subjected to human interference and control. One of these is man himself (medicine and public health). The other is land (agriculture and coservation). The effort to control the health of land has not been very successful.Collection: Successful
...to any one for whom wild things are something more than a pleasant diversion, (conservation) constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution.Collection: Moral
Wilderness is a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks' pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.Collection: Country
There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.Collection: Time
Mechanized recreation already has seized nine-tenths of the woods and mountains; a decent respect for minorities should dedicate the other tenth to wilderness.Collection: Mountain
Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.Collection: Country
Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow... the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.Collection: Impossible
The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.Collection: Lying
On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.Collection: Sky
For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.Collection: Nature
There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.Collection: Land
The government tells us we need flood control and comes to straighten the creek in our pasture. The engineer on the job tells us the creek is now able to carry off more flood water, but in the process we have lost our old willows where the owl hooted on a winter night and under which the cows switched flies in the noon shade. We lost the little marshy spot where our fringed gentians bloomed.Collection: Jobs
It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense.Collection: Philosophical
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.Collection: Thinking
The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.Collection: Portraits