Aldo Leopold

“Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.”

“Six days shalt thou paddle and pack, but on the seventh thou shall wash thy socks.”

“Our new camp is on a windswept rock point. … We don't know what lake we're on, and don't care ...”

“Many of the attributes most distinctive of America and Americans are the impress of the wilderness. … Shall we now exterminate this thing that made us Americans?”

“Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?”

“Conservation is not merely a thing to be enshrined in outdoor museums, but a way of living on land.”

“Patriotism requires less and less of making the eagle scream, but more and more of making him think.”

“What more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and, by cautious experimentation, to prove how it works? What more substantial service to conservation than to practice it on one's own land?”

“Bread and beauty grow best together. Their harmonious integration can make farming not only a business but an art; the land not only a food-factory but an instrument for self-expression, on which each can play music to his own choosing.”

“[After describing a hopper for feeding winter game:] If you think you're too old to enjoy building such contraptions — that only Boy Scouts get a kick out of such nonsense — just try it. You may end up by building several.”

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

“We are touring the Ozarks. Here is an abandoned field in which the ragweed is sparse and short. Does this tell us anything about why the mortgage was foreclosed? About how long ago? Would this field be a good place to look for quail? Does short ragweed have any connection with the human story behind yonder graveyard? If all the ragweed in this watershed were short, would that tell us anything about the future of floods in the steam? About the future prospects for bass or trout?”

“A profession is a body of men who voluntarily measure their work by a higher standard than their clients demand. To be professionally acceptable, a policy must be sound as well as salable. Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.”

“The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.”

“Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. … Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.”

“We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve, but to strive. … The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of 'conservation education'.”

“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.”

“Ideas, like men, can become dictators. We Americans have so far escaped regimentation by our rulers, but have we escaped regimentation by our own ideas? I doubt if there exists today a more complete regimentation of the human mind than that accomplished by our self-imposed doctrine of ruthless utilitarianism.”

“The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.”

“Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.”

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

“Hunting for sport is an improvement over hunting for food, in that there has been added to the test of skill and ethical code, which the hunter formulates for himself, and must live up to without the moral support of bystanders.”

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

“Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.”

“Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches.”

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

“There are those who are willing to be herded in droves through 'scenic' places; who find mountains grand if they be proper mountains, with waterfalls, cliffs, and lakes. To such the Kansas plains are tedious. They see the endless corn, but not the heave and grunt of ox teams breaking the prairie. History, for them, grows on campuses. They look at the low horizon, but they cannot see it, as de Vaca did, under the bellies of the buffalo.”

“Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism.”

“How would you like to have a thousand brilliantly colored cliff swallows keeping house in the eaves of your barn, and gobbling up insects over your farm at the rate of 100,000 per day? There are many Wisconsin farmsteads where such a swallow-show is a distinct possibility.”

“[This book] has done well to preserve this saga of how the state was made safe for cows. How the state is to be made safe from cows is a saga yet to be written.”

“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.”

“That the situation is hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.”

“The direction is clear, and the first step is to throw your weight around on matters of right and wrong in land-use. Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays. That philosophy is dead in human relations, and its funeral in land-relations is overdue.”

“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.”

“Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.”

“That biological jack-of-all-trades called ecologist tries to be and do all these things. Needless to say, he does not succeed.”

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

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

“For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.”

“The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Man brings all things to the test of himself, and this is notably true of lightning.”

“An oak is no respecter of persons.”

“In that year [1865] John Muir offered to buy from his brother … a sanctuary for the wildflowers that had gladdened his youth. His brother declined to part with the land, but he could not suppress the idea: 1865 still stands in Wisconsin history as the birth-year of mercy for things natural, wild, and free.”

“One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.”

“Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.”

“What a dull world if we knew all about geese!”

“There are degrees and kinds of solitude. … I know of no solitude so secure as one guarded by a spring flood; nor do the geese, who have seen more kinds and degrees of aloneness than I have.”

“He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowingly. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.”

“Engineers did not discover insulation: they copied it from these old soldiers of the prairie war.”

“He who owns a veteran bur oak owns more than a tree. He owns a historical library, and a reserved seat in the theater of evolution. To the discerning eye, his farm is labeled with the badge and symbol of the prairie war.”

“It is fortunate, perhaps, that no matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all of the salient facts about any one of 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.”

“Whoever invented the word ‘grace’ must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.”

“In farm country, the plover has only two real enemies: the gully and the drainage ditch. Perhaps we shall one day find that these are our enemies, too.”

“How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! … Even so, I think there is some virtue in eagerness, whether its object prove true or false.”

“One hundred and twenty acres, according to the County Clerk, is the extent of my worldly domain. But the County Clerk is a sleepy fellow, who never looks at his record books before nine o’clock. What they would show at daybreak is the question here at issue. Books or no books, it is a fact, patent both to my dog and myself, that at daybreak I am the sole owner of all the acres I can walk over. It is not only boundaries that disappear, but also the thought of being bounded.”

“During every week from April to September there are, on the average, ten wild plants coming into first bloom. … No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them. … 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.”

“The erasure of a human subspecies is largely painless — to us — if we know little enough about it. A dead Chinaman is of little import to us whose awareness of things Chinese is bounded by an occasional dish of chow mein. We grieve only for what we know. The erasure of Silphium from western Dane County is no cause for grief if one knows it only as a name in a botany book.”

“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.”

“It is on some, but not all, of these misty autumn day-breaks that one may hear the chorus of the quail. The silence is suddenly broken by a dozen contralto voices, no longer able to restrain their praise of the day to come.”

“Hunts differ in flavor, but the reasons are subtle. The sweetest hunts are stolen. To steal a hunt, either go far into the wilderness where no one has been, or else find some undiscovered place under everybody’s nose.”

“My dog, by the way, thinks I have much to learn about partridges, and, being a professional naturalist, I agree.”

“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 modern dogma is comfort at any cost.”

“The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler. … The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa.”

“Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree—and there will be one.”

“When we hear [the crane’s] call we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.”

“Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow of jewels.”

“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 [passenger] 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?”

“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.”

“Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.These things, I say, should have come to us. I fear they have not come to many.”

“The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. … Perhaps every youth needs an occasional wilderness trip, in order to learn the meaning of this particular freedom.”

“There are a few sections of uncut timber, luckily state-owned.”

“Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.”

“When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.”

“It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.”

“Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”

“Science contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world. Its great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view. This means doubting everything except facts; it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may.”

“Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.”

“Barring love and war, few enterprises are undertaken with such abandon, or by such diverse individuals, or with so paradoxical a mixture of appetite and altruism, as that group of avocations known as outdoor recreation. It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature. But wherein lies the goodness, and what can be done to encourage its pursuit?”

“Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.”

“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.”

“Like all real treasures of the mind, perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas.”

“The trophy-recreationist has peculiarities that contribute in subtle ways to his own undoing. To enjoy he must possess, invade, appropriate. Hence the wilderness that he cannot personally see has no value to him. Hence the universal assumption that an unused hinterland is rendering no service to society. To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.”

“Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.”

“A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than by a mob of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact.”

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

“Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven; one may never get there.”

“If education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new. Youth yet unborn will pole up the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or climb the Sierras with James Capen Adams, and each generation in turn will ask: Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren’t looking.”

“Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility.”

“All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.”

“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. I regard the present conservation movement as the embryo of such an affirmation.”

“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.”

“The ordinary citizen today assumes that science knows what makes the community clock tick; the scientist is equally sure that he does not.”

“Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.”

“Land-use ethics are still governed wholly by economic self-interest, just as social ethics were a century ago.”

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

“One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value. Wildflowers and songbirds are examples. Of the 22,000 higher plants and animals native to Wisconsin, it is doubtful whether more than 5 per cent can be sold, fed, eaten, or otherwise put to economic use. Yet these creatures are members of the biotic community, and if (as I believe) its stability depends on its integrity, they are entitled to continuance.”

“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.”

“An ethic to supplement and guide the economic relation to land presupposes the existence of some mental image of land as a biotic mechanism.”

“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 have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever ‘written’ … it evolves in the minds of a thinking community.”

“In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.”