Aldo Leopold

"The land ethic is neither right nor left; it is simply the future if we are to have one."

"To live in harmony with nature requires that we surrender our illusion of dominion."

"Leopold taught that conservation is not a luxury but a necessity for our survival."

"We abuse land because we see 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 land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land."

"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."

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

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

"Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land."

"In every civilization, there has been something like a cultural lag in the sense that ethical ideas have lagged behind economic and technological change."

"Wildlife can still serve us in the economic sense, but we abuse our privilege when we try to make it serve us in no other way."

"The crows do not all wear the same clothing, but when viewed at a distance appear as one black mass."

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

"We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in."

"The land is one organism. Its parts, like our own parts, compete with each other and cooperate with each other."

"The only way to keep our civilization in a relatively stable condition is to maintain as much wildness as possible."

"Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how."

"I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness."

"The real tragedy is that by the time we know enough to save the land, we will have lost it."

"Ecological science has wrought a change in the mental eye. It has enlarged the boundaries of the visual world."

"The farmer is the only businessman permitted to exhaust his resource and still remain a businessman."

"Thinking like a mountain requires imagination and intellectual humility."

"The mountains are calling and we must go."

"A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land."

"All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts."

"The land remembers. A clear cut is still a clear cut decades later."

"Education, I fear, is learning to see one world and to forget to see another."

"We grouse about taxes, labor, and prices, but we do not grouse about the loss of our wilderness."

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

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