Aldo Leopold

"Conservation is repairing what the world is doing wrong."

"Our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to perceive beauty."

"Evolution is happening to the land at the same time we are happening to it."

"A sand county is an old place; old in character and old in wisdom."

"The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he can pick up his heels and go elsewhere."

"Wilderness areas are first of all a series of closely-observed records of the human mind."

"The trend of events so far in this century offers no reason to believe that parks will suffice."

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

"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. This is a statement of aesthetic principles."

"Wilderness is the one alternative to human control that is worth very much to anybody."

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

"When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."

"I believe that if all the animals were gone tomorrow, the human species would fail miserably within a few years."

"A deer in the hand is no better than a deer in the bush; both are worth more alive than dead."

"The ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility."

"You cannot love what you do not respect."

"There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot."

"The conservation movement must be reborn with a new philosophy."

"Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal."

"Land can be healthy without permanent human occupation, and its continued presence is prerequisite to anything Americans do, alone or in politics."

"We face the question whether a still higher standard of living is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free."

"The most important game animal, the one that takes the most effort to find, is the ruffed grouse."

"A song sparrow sings from the meadow, unaware that its days are numbered."

"Land respect is not inherent in human nature."

"The trend in American life has been toward increasing comfort and decreasing perception of what comfort costs."

"The problem is one of attitudes and implements. We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam shovel, and we are proud of our yardage."

"Wildlife administration must change from a game-farm mentality to an ecological conscience."

"The land-health concept is the basic wherewithall of conservation."

"Evolution will always remain pure speculation without fossil evidence to anchor it to fact."

"An ethical obligation on the land is something so new in human history that our speculative philosophers have not yet devised a name for it."