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Aldo Leopold
119 quotes
“An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation. The ecologist calls these symbioses. Politics and economics are advanced symbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been replaced, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief. I regard the present conservation movement as the embryo of such an affirmation.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. … 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.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter downriver. Certainly not the waters, which we assume have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off sewage. Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate whole communities without batting an eye. Certainly not the animals, of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ordinary citizen today assumes that science knows what makes the community clock tick; the scientist is equally sure that he does not.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Land-use ethics are still governed wholly by economic self-interest, just as social ethics were a century ago.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value. Wildflowers and songbirds are examples. Of the 22,000 higher plants and animals native to Wisconsin, it is doubtful whether more than 5 per cent can be sold, fed, eaten, or otherwise put to economic use. Yet these creatures are members of the biotic community, and if (as I believe) its stability depends on its integrity, they are entitled to continuance.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An ethic to supplement and guide the economic relation to land presupposes the existence of some mental image of land as a biotic mechanism.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a ‘scenic’ area, he is bored stiff. If crops could be raised by hydroponics instead of farming, it would suit him very well. Synthetic substitutes for wood, leather, wool, and other natural land products suit him better than the originals. In short, land is something he has ‘outgrown.’”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Modern natural history deals only incidentally with the identity of plants and animals, and only incidentally with their habits and behaviors. It deals principally with their relations to each other, their relation to the soil and water in which they grow, and their relations to the human beings who sing about 'my country' but see little or nothing of its inner workings. This new science of relationships is called ecology, but what we call it matters nothing. The question is, does the educated citizen know he is only a cog in an ecological mechanism? That if he will work with that mechanism his mental wealth and his material wealth can expand indefinitely? But that if he refuses to work with it, it will ultimately grind him to dust? If education does not teach us these things, then what is education for?”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Natural History: The Forgotten Science" [1938]; Published in Round River, Luna B. Leopold (ed.), Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 63-64.
“The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only those who know the most about it can appreciation how little we know about it. 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.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Conservation" (c. 1938); Published in Round River, Luna B. Leopold (ed.), Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 146-147.
“To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs. A roadless marsh is seemingly as worthless to the alphabetical conservationist as an undrained one was to the empire-builders. Solitude, the one natural resource still undowered of alphabets, is so far recognized as valuable only by ornithologists and cranes. Thus always does history, whether of marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. … I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers. Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it—a vast pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.”
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) said by 1948 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source