I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
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.
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.
Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.
We abuse land because we see 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.
To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.
There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of those who cannot
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.
Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.
Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.
Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.
We shall never achieve harmony with the land, anymore than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.
Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.
The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?
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.
Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth?
We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of the land.
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.
The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.
One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.
Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.
That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.
The good life of any river may depend on the perception of its music; and the preservation of some music to perceive.
To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.
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, A Sand County Almanac
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... The land is one organism.
No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.
What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, the stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow... creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.
Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education.
At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.
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.
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.
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.
It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it.
...the most fun lies in seeing and studying the unknown.
Getting up too early is a vice habitual in horned owls, stars, geese, and freight trains. Some hunters acquire it from geese, and some coffee pots from hunters.
In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.
...never had there been so rare a day, or so rich a solitude top spend it in.
Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how.
Camp-keeping in the Delta was not all beer and skittles.
