Quotes from Aldo Leopold

The enthusiasm of geese for high water is a subtle thing, and might be overlooked by those unfamiliar with goose gossip...

What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked.

Camp-keeping in the Delta was not all beer and skittles.

Do not let anyone tell you that these people made work of play. They simply realized that the most fun lies in seeing and studying the unknown.

it is disquieting to feel that the conversion into a National Forest or Park always means the esthetic death of a piece of wild country.

SOME PAINTINGS become famous because, being durable, they are viewed by successive generations, in each of which are likely to be found a few appreciative eyes. 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 the mind's eye.

The mouse is a sober citizen who knows that the grass grows in order that mice may store it as underground haystacks, and that snow falls in order that mice may build subways from stack to stack…

I have read many definitions of what is a conservationist, and written not a few myself, but I suspect that the best one is written not with a pen, but with an axe. It is a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land.

And in this annual barter of food for light, and winter warmth for summer solitude, the whole continent receives as net profit a wild poem dropped from the murky skies upon the muds of March.

The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. He is no longer the only one to do so. When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: he could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker: he could chop it down. Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants.

Il Signore dà e il Signore toglie, ma Egli non è più il solo a farlo. Quando il nostro lontano antenato inventò la pala l'uomo fu in grado di dare: poteva piantare un albero; quando inventò l'ascia gli fu possibile togliere: poteva tagliarlo. Chi possiede della terra ha assunto, più o meno consapevolmente, le funzioni divine di creare e distruggere le piante.

Obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to land.

It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense.

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends to do otherwise.

It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.

Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.

November is, for many reasons, the month for the axe

Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants.

I feel a deep sense of security in this single-mindedness of freight trains

Obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to the land

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.

The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.

The only true development in American recreational resources is the development of the perceptive faculty in Americans. All of the other acts we grace by that name are, at best, attempts to retard or mask the process of dilution.

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.