Aldo Leopold

It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.

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

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven; one may never get there.

I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever ‘written’ … it evolves in the minds of a thinking community.

Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a ‘scenic’ area, he is bored stiff. If crops could be raised by hydroponics instead of farming, it would suit him very well. Synthetic substitutes for wood, leather, wool, and other natural land products suit him better than the originals. In short, land is something he has ‘outgrown.’

Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.

These things, I say, should have come to us. I fear they have not come to many.

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?

Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. 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.

The ordinary citizen today assumes that science knows what makes the community clock tick; the scientist is equally sure that he does not.

All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.

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