Aldo Leopold
Aldo Leopold
Aldo Leopoldwas an American author, scientist, ecologist, forester, conservationist, and environmentalist. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin and is best known for his book A Sand County Almanac, which has sold more than two million copies...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth11 January 1887
CityBurlington, IA
CountryUnited States of America
land self renewal
Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal.
mother country stars
Two things hold promise of improving those lights. One is to apply science to land-use. The other is to cultivate a love of country a little less spangled with stars, and a little more imbued with that respect for mother-earth - the lack of which is, to me, the outstanding attribute of the machine-age.
self gadgets backpacking
Then came the gadgeteer, otherwise known as the sporting-goods dealer. He has draped the American outdoorsman with an infinity of contraptions, all offered as aids to self-reliance, hardihood, woodcraft, or marksmanship, but too often functioning as substitutes for them. Gadgets fill the pockets, they dangle from neck and belt. The overflow fills the auto-trunk and also the trailer. Each item of outdoor equipment grows lighter and often better, but the aggregate poundage becomes tonnage.
lying creating understanding
The hope of the future lies not in curbing the influence of human occupancy - it is already too late for that - but in creating a better understanding of the extent of that influence and a new ethic for its governance.
persons oaks
An oak is no respecter of persons.
fall wind tree
The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry. The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playing swirls, and the wind hurries on.... A tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind.
exercise skills negative
Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.
long mountain conservation
Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.
behavior ethical wrong-things
Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.
wings grace folding
Whoever invented the word 'grace' must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.
moral evolution conservation
...to any one for whom wild things are something more than a pleasant diversion, (conservation) constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution.
song nature mean
This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all.... On a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen ... and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it - a vast pulsing harmony - its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.
tree needs may
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.
nature environmental wilderness
I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.