Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. Aldo Leopold More Quotes by Aldo Leopold More Quotes From Aldo Leopold High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks, and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness ... A new day has begun on the crane marsh. A sense of time lies thick and heavy on such a place ... Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. Aldo Leopold nature beautiful art 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. Aldo Leopold land animal water Relegating conservation to government is like relegating virtue to the Sabbath. Turns over to professionals what should be daily work of amateurs . Aldo Leopold conservation virtue government One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Aldo Leopold environmental rivers world We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all. Aldo Leopold environmental rivers museums We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. Aldo Leopold safety comfort long To those who know the speech of hills and rivers straightening a stream is like shipping vagrants—a very successful method of passing trouble from one place to the next. It solves nothing in any collective sense. Aldo Leopold next successful rivers Six days shalt thou paddle and pack, but on the seventh thou shall wash thy socks. Aldo Leopold sock packs six Time was when education moved toward soil, not away from it. Aldo Leopold moved soil land Third, there is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called 'sportsmanship'. Our tools for the pursuit of wildlife improve faster than we do, and sportsmanship is the voluntary limitation in the use of these armaments. It is aimed to augment the role of skill and shrink the role of Gadgets in the pursuit of wild things. Aldo Leopold sportsmanship skills exercise The sweetest hunts are stolen. To steal a hunt, either go far into the wilderness where no one has been, or else find some undiscovered place under everybody's nose Aldo Leopold wilderness stealing noses 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 nature long interesting Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master? Aldo Leopold realizing poor might If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. Aldo Leopold tinkering cogs land I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush and it is the same river who before I can bring my friends to view his work erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind's eye. Aldo Leopold eye views rivers Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events. Aldo Leopold records events order Every farm woodland, in addition to yielding lumber, fuel and posts, should provide its owner a liberal education. This crop of wisdom never fails, but it is not always harvested. Aldo Leopold fuel failing nature 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. 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 wilderness 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 running men life If in a city we had six vacant lots available to the youngsters of a certain neighborhood for playing ball, it might be "development" to build houses on the first, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, and even the fifth, but when we build houses on the last one, we forget what houses are for. Aldo Leopold nature cities house 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. Aldo Leopold growing-up girl animal
