297 Quotes by Aldo Leopold

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.

Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.

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.

We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses.

The river was nowhere and everywhere, for he could not decide which of a hundred green lagoons offered the most pleasant and least speedy path to the Gulf. So he traveled them all, and so did we. He divided and rejoined, he twisted and turned, he meandered in awesome jungles, he all but ran in circles, he dallied with lovely groves, he got lost and was glad of it, and so were we. For the last word in procrastination, go travel with a river reluctant to lose his freedom in the sea.

Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. 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.

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.

The rich diversity of the world’s cultures reflects a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth.

Unsportsmanlike predator-killing is always rationalized as defence of property – usually someone else’s property. This excuse is getting too thin to pass muster among thinking conservationists.