Quotes from Aldo Leopold

November is, for many reasons, the month for the axe. It is warm enough to grind an axe without freezing, but cold enough to fell a tree in comfort.

A cardinal, whistling spring to a thaw but later finding himself mistaken, can retrieve his error by resuming his winter silence. A chipmunk, emerging for a sunbath but finding a blizzard, has only to go back to bed. But a migrating goose, staking two hundred miles of black night on the chance of finding a hole in the lake, has no easy chance for retreat. His arrival carries the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges.

In general, the trend of the evidence indicates that in land, just as in the human body, the symptoms may lie in one organ and the cause in another. The practices we now call conservation are, to a large extent, local alleviations of biotic pain. They are necessary, but they must not be confused with cures. The art of land doctoring is being practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born.

By this international commerce of geese, the waste corn of Illinois is carried through the clouds to the Arctic tundras, there to combine with the waste sunlight of a nightless June to grow goslings fro all the lands between. And in this annual barter of food for light, and winter warmth for summer solitude, the whole continent receives as a net profit a wild poem dropped from the murky skies upon the muds of March.

What the youth needs to be told is that a ship is a-building in his own mental dry dock, a ship with freedom of the seas.

What a dull world if we knew all about geese!

The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler. He nests in an old woodpecker hole, or other small cavity, in a dead snag overhanging water. The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa. When you doubt the wisdom of this arrangement, take a look at the prothonotary.

our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs that it has lost the stability necessary to build them, or even to turn off the tap.

If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where the heat comes from...

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

Toda protección de la vida salvaje está condenada al fracaso, porque para querer necesitamos ver y acariciar y cuando un número suficiente de gente haya visto y acariciado no quedará nada que querer.

Draba plucks no heartstrings. Its perfume, if there is any, is lost in the gusty winds. Its color is plain white. Its leaves wear a sensible woolly coat. Nothing eats it; it is too small. No poets sing of it. Some botanist once gave it a Latin name, and then forgot it. Altogether, it is of no importance – just a small creature that does a small job quickly and well.

It might be wise to prohibit at once all teaching of real botany and real history, lest some future citizen suffer qualms about the floristic price of his good life.

Solitude, the one natural resource still undowered of alphabets, is so far recognized as valuable only by ornithologists and cranes.

Um dos castigos impostos por uma educação ecológica é viver solitariamente em um mundo ferido. Para um leigo, muitos dos danos causados à Terra são invisíveis. Um ecologista deve se embrutecer e fazer de conta que não tem nada a ver com as consequências da ciência, ou deve ser como um médico que vê marcas da morte em uma comunidade que acredita estar saudável e não quer ser convencida do contrário.

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

It seems timely, therefore, to segregate the components, and to examine the distinctive characteristics or properties of each.

Mechanized man, oblivious of floras, is proud of his progress in cleaning up the landscape on which, willy-nilly, he must live out his days. It might be wise to prohibit at once all teaching of real botany and real history, lest some future citizen suffer qualms about the floristic price of his good life.

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

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.

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

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

Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.