Quotes About Environment

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

The good life of any river may depend on the perception of its music; and the preservation of some music to perceive.

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.

There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of those who cannot

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

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.

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.

The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

We forest officers, who acquiesced in the extinguishment of the bear, knew a local rancher who had plowed up a dagger engraved with the name of one of Coronado´s captains. We spoke harshly of the Spaniards, who, in their zeal for gold and converts, had needlessly extinguished the native Indians. It did not occur to us that we, too, were the captains of an invasion too sure of its righteousness.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

there are two kinds of people: those who can live without wild things & those who cannot.

During every week from April to September there are, on the average, ten wild plants coming into first bloom.

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.

I am convinced that most Americans of the new generation have no idea what a decent forest looks like. The only way to tell them is to show them.

Our grandfathers were less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by which they bettered their lot are also those which deprived us of pigeons. Perhaps we now grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts, that we have gained by the exchange. The gadgets of industry bring us more comforts than the pigeons did, but do they add as much to the glory of the spring?