Aldo Leopold

"The opportunity to see geese is more valuable than the opportunity to shoot them."

"Land is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals."

"Wilderness areas are the one thing I would urge you to fight for."

"The land ethic presupposes the existence of some mental image of land as a biotic mechanism."

"Without ethical guidance, our conservation efforts will ultimately fail."

"Integrity, beauty, and stability are the measure of a healthy land."

"The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land."

"In every walk with nature, one discovers more than he seeks."

"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."

"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."

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

"Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest."

"Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow."

"The land is one organism. Its parts, like our own parts, compete for its substance; this competition, however, promotes rather than prevents the existence of the whole."

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

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

"The tragedy of the commons is that each person acts in their own best interest, destroying what they all depend upon."

"Wildlife can be restored by the creative use of the same tools which have deprived it."

"Wilderness gives definition and meaning to the human enterprise."

"The real tragedy of the American frontier is not that it is lost, but that America lost the native peoples and cultures that sustained it."

"A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it."

"The lands ethic reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land."

"Beauty in the natural world reflects the integrity of the systems that create it."

"Once you learn to read the land, you begin to understand its language."

"The effort to remodel the world according to our wants is, in the end, defeated by the world's resistance."

"Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land."

"We need more leisure, not less, if we are to enjoy the natural world."

"The land remembers; it keeps its own counsel and reveals itself only to those who seek with patience and humility."

"Good oak husbandry requires that the owner be willing to farm for timber with the same care and skill he gives to crops."

"The diversity of life is not an accident but a necessity for a healthy world."