297 Quotes by Aldo Leopold

Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.

Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.

Mechanized recreation already has seized nine-tenths of the woods and mountains; a decent respect for minorities should dedicate the other tenth to wilderness.

Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run,

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.

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.

The life of every river sings its own song, but in most the song is long marred by the discords of misuse.

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.

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