Aldo Leopold Quotes (1887-1948)

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“      January Thaw Each year, after the midwinter blizzards, there comes a night of thaw when the tinkle of dripping water is heard in the land. It brings strange stirrings, not only to creatures abed for the night, but to some who have been asleep for the winter. The hibernating skunk, curled up in his deep den, uncurls himself and ventures forth to prowl the wet world, dragging his belly in the snow. His track marks one of the earliest datable events in that cycles of beginnings and ceasings which we call a year.”

“A flock of a dozen chickadees spends the year in my woods. In winter, when we are harvesting diseased or dead trees for our fuel wood, the ring of the axe is dinner gong fro the chickadee tribe. ... But for diseases and insect pests, there would likely be no food in the trees, and hence no chickadees to add cheer to my woods in winter. Many other kinds of wildlife depend on tree diseases. My pileated woodpeckers chisel living plants, to extract fat grubs from the diseased heartwood. My barred owls find surcease from crows and jays in the hollow heart of an old basswood; but for this diseased tree their sundown serenade would probably be silenced. My wood ducks nest in hollow trees; every June brings its broad of downy ducklings to my woodland slough. All squirrels depend, for permanent dens, on a delicately balanced equilibrium between a rotting cavity and the scar tissue with which the tree attempts to close the wound. The squirrels referee the contest by gnawing out the scar tissue when it begins unduly to shrink the amplitude of their front door.”

“The ... problem of elk protection ... forced Leopold to lay his conservation cards on the table. For virtually all other species of native big game, conservationists could rationalize their efforts as a sure good, since they had no detrimental effect on the human economy. Elk, however, did damage to crops.”