A biography for Aldo Leopoldhasn’t been written yet.
“I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.”
“Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.”
“Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.”
“We shall never achieve harmony with the land, anymore than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.”
“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.”
“No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.”
“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?”
“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.”