Quotes About Stewardship

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

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.

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

To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

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.

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.

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.

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. That lands yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: What good is it?

This whole effort to rebuild and stabilize a countryside is not without its disappointments and mistakes... What matter though these temporary growing pains when one can cast his eye upon the hills and see hard-boiled farmers who have spent their lives destroying land now carrying water by hand to their new plantations

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.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land, but not by the land.

That wildlife is merely something to shoot at or to look at is the grossest of fallacies.