Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Aldo Leopold (American Conservationist)

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948,) fully Rand Aldo Leopold, was an American ecologist, forester, and environmentalist. This “father of wildlife ecology” wrote A Sand County Almanac (1949,) which was read by millions and strongly influenced the nascent environmental conservation movement.

Born in Burlington, Iowa, Leopold attended Yale University, obtained a master’s degree in forestry, and worked for the U.S. Forest Service (1909–28) surveying and drawing maps. His activism for the causes of wilderness protection and soil management led to the creation of the Gila Wilderness Area (1924) in New Mexico; it was America’s first national wilderness area.

Leopold worked for the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturing Association and wrote Game Management (1933.) He became a Professor of Game Management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison 1933–48 and expounded the science of ecology to the conservation of wildlife populations and habitats.

A zealous crusader for the preservation of wildlife and wilderness areas, Leopold was a director of the Audubon Society from 1935 and became a founder of the Wilderness Society in the same year.

Published posthumously, A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There (1948) outlined his philosophy of “land ethic”—the human race must develop a new ethical bond with the land and the non-human things that lived on it. This book is still considered one of the most influential texts of the conservation movement.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Aldo Leopold

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in part, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness

I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness

There is yet no social stigma in the possession of a gullied form, a wrecked forest or a polluted stream, provided the dividends suffice to send the youngsters to college. What ever ails the land, the government will fix it.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness

The key to intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness

Harmony with the land is like harmony with a friend. You cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say you cannot have game and hate predators. The land is one organism.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Harmony, Wilderness

Wilderness is a continuous stretch of county 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.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness

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.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness

Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness

One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Seasons

Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness

The time is almost upon us when a pack-train must wind its way up a graveled highway and turn its bellmare in the pasture of a summer hotel. When that day comes, the pack-train will be dead, the diamond hitch will be merely rope, and Kit Carson and Jim Bridger will be names in a history lesson. And thenceforth the march of empire will be a matter of gasoline and four wheel brakes.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness

Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals. Food chains are the living channels which conduct energy upward; death and decay return it to the soil. The circuit is not closed; some energy is dissipated in decay, some is added by absorption from the air, some is stored in soils, peats, and long-lived forests; but it is a sustained circuit, like a slowly augmented revolving fund of life.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness

Wilderness, then, assumes unexpected importance as a laboratory for the study of land-health.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness

The art of land doctoring is being practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness

We of the genus Homo ride the logs that float down the Round river, and by a little judicious “burling” we have learned to guide their direction and speed. This feat entitles us to the specific appellation sapiens. The technique of burling is called economics, the remembering of old routes is called in history, the selection of new ones is called statesmanship, the conversation about oncoming rifles and rapids is called politics. Some of the crew aspire to burl not only their own blogs, but the whole flotilla as well. This collective bargaining with nature is called national planning.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness

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.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Achievement, Aspirations, Harmony

The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness

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.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness

The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
Aldo Leopold

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness, One liners

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.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness

To keep every cog and every wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wildlife

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.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Summer

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. To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue. To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside. If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where heat comes from, and with a wealth of detail denied to those who spend the weekend in town astride a radiator.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Farming

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow… the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness

Man always kills the things 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?
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness

The good life on any river may… depend on the perception of its music, and the preservation of some music to perceive.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness

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.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wildlife

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.
Aldo Leopold
Topics: Wilderness

The shrinkage in the flora is due to a combination of clean-farming, woodlot grazing, and good roads. Each of these necessary changes of course requires a larger reduction in the acreage available for wild plants, but none of them requires, or benefits by, the erasure of species from whole farms, townships, or counties. There are idle spots on every farm, and every highway is bordered by an idle strip as long as it is; keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen.
Aldo Leopold

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