Quotes from Aldo Leopold

It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it

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.

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

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

Relegating conservation to government is like relegating virtue to the Sabbath. Turns over to professionals what should be daily work of amateurs .

. . . perhaps our grandsons, having never seen a wild river, will never miss the chance to set a canoe in singing waters . . . glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in.

No farmer-sportsman group is stronger than the ties of mutual confidence and enthusiasm which bind its members.

For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.

What conservation education must build is an ethical underpinning for land economics and a universal curiosity to understand the land mechanism. Conservation may then follow.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

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.

In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.

Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you.

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