Aldo Leopold
Aldo Leopold
Aldo Leopold was an American writer, philosopher, naturalist, scientist, ecologist, forester, professor, conservationist, and environmentalist. He taught at the University of Wisconsin and is best known for his book A Sand County Almanac (1949), which has been translated into fifteen languages and has sold more than two million copies.
"All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. … The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. … A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such."
"That the situation is hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best."
"But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy."
"We speak glibly of conservation education, but what do we mean by it? If we mean indoctrination, then let us be reminded that it is just as easy to indoctrinate with fallacies as with facts. If we mean to teach the capacity for independent judgement, then I am appalled by the magnitude of the task."
"Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. 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. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the aesthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture."
"If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left, in my opinion, worth fighting for; or to be more exact, a completely industrialized United States is of no consequence to me."
"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."
"That biological jack-of-all-trades called ecologist tries to be and do all these things. Needless to say, he does not succeed."
"There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why."
"To the mouse, snow means freedom from want and fear. … To a rough-legged hawk, a thaw means freedom from want and fear."
"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."
"I personally believed, at least in 1914 when predator control began, that there could not be too much horned game, and that the extirpation of predators was a reasonable price to pay for better big game hunting. Some of us have learned since the tragic error of such a view, and acknowledged our mistake. One must judge from the present volume that the Fish and Wildlife Service does not see any mistake."
