Aldo Leopold Quotes

Following are some of my favorite quotes by Aldo Leopold from A Sand County Almanac with Essays on Conservation from Round River.


Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech. –Foreword

…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. Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings…Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free. –Foreword

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. –February: Good Oak

These things I ponder as the kettle sings, and the good oak burns to red coals on white ashes. Those ashes, come spring I will return to the orchard at the foot of the sandhill. They will come back to me again, perhaps as red apples, or perhaps as a spirit of enterprise in some fat October squirrel, who, for reasons unknown to himself, is bent on planting acorns. –February: Good Oak

It is fortunate, perhaps, that no matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all of the salient facts about any one of them. –April: Skydance

What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creel, but my memory. –June: The Alder Fork – A Fishing Idyll

Books or no books, it is a fact, patent both to my dog and myself, that at daybreak I am the sole owner of all the acres I can walk over. It is not only boundaries that disappear, but also the thought of being bounded. Expanses unknown to deed or map are known to every dawn, and solitude, supposed no longer to exist in my country, extends on every hand as far as the dew can reach. –July: Great Possessions

We grieve only for what we know. The erasure of Silphium from western Dane County is no cause for grief if one knows it only as a name in a botany book. –July: Prairie Birthday

Every farm woodland, in addition to yielding lumber, fuel, and posts, should provide its owner a liberal education. This crop of wisdom never fails, but it is not always harvested. –November: A Mighty Fortress

Every farm is a textbook on animal ecology; woodsmanship is the translation of the book. –December: Homerange

But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wildness left to cherish. –Wisconsin: Marshland Elegy

That the prairie is rich is known to the humblest deermouse; why the prairie is rich is a question seldom asked in all the still lapse of ages. –Wisconsin: Odyssey

Perhaps every youth needs an occasional wilderness trip, in order to learn the meaning of this particular freedom. –Wisconsin: Flambeau

Perhaps our grandsons, having never seen a wild river, will never miss the chance to set a canoe in singing waters. –Wisconsin: Flambeau

Despite several opportunities to do so, I have never returned to the White Mountain. I prefer not to see what tourists, roads, sawmills, and logging railroads have done for it, or to it. I hear young people, not yet born when I first rode out ‘on top’, explain about it as a wonderful place. To this, with an unspoken mental reservation, I agree. –Arizona and New Mexico: On Top

Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf. –Arizona and New Mexico: Thinking Like a Mountain

I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. –Arizona and New Mexico: Thinking Like a Mountain

…but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men. –Arizona and New Mexico: Thinking Like a Mountain

He did not foresee that within two decades the cow country would become tourist country, and as such have greater need of bears than of beefsteaks. –Arizona and New Mexico: Escudilla

We spoke harshly of the Spaniards who, in their zeal for gold and converts, had needlessly extinguished the native Indians. It did not occur to us that we, too, were the captains of an invasion too sure of its own righteousness. –Arizona and New Mexico: Escudilla

Escudilla still hangs on the horizon, but when you see it you no longer think of bear. It’s only a mountain now. –Arizona and New Mexico: Escudilla

Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wildness. 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? –Chihuahua and Sonora: The Green Lagoon

There is, as yet, no sense of pride in the husbandry of wild plants and animals, no sense of shame in the proprietorship of a sick landscape. We tilt windmills in behalf of conservation in convention halls and editorial offices, but on the back forty we disclaim even owning a lance. –Oregon and Utah: Cheat Takes Over

Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another. –Manitoba: Clandeboye

That wildlife is merely something to shoot at or to look at is the grossest of fallacies. –Country

In country, as in people, a plain exterior often conceals hidden riches, to perceive which requires much living in and with. –Country

Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism. Its parts, like our own parts, compete with each other and co-operate with each other. The competitions are as much a part of the inner workings as the co-operations. You can regulate them – cautiously – but not abolish them. –The Round River

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: ‘What good is it?’ If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. –The Round River

American conservation is, I fear, still concerned for the most part with show pieces. We have not yet learned to think in terms of small cogs and wheels. –The Round River

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. –The Round River

No ‘fortuitous concourse of elements’ working blindly through any number of millions of years could quite account for why warblers are so beautiful. No mechanistic theory, even bolstered by mutations, has ever quite answered for the colors of the cerulean warbler, or the vespers of the woodthrush, or the swansong, or – goose music. –Goose Music

I have congenital hunting fever and three sons. As little tots, they spent their time playing with my decoys and scouring vacant lots with wooden guns. I hope to leave them good health, and education, and possibly even a competence. But what are they going to do with these things if there be no more deer in the hills, and no more quail in the coverts? No more snipe whistling in the meadow, no more piping of widgeons and chattering of teal as darkness covers the marshes; no more whistling of soft wings when the morning star pales in the east? And when the dawn-wind stirs through the ancient cottonwoods, and the gray light steals down from the hills over the old river sliding softly past its wide brown sandbars – what if there be no more goose music? –Goose Music

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. Despite nearly a century of propaganda, conservation still proceeds at a snail’s pace; progress still consists largely of letterhead pieties and convention oratory. On the back forty we still slip two steps backward for each forward stride. –The Land Ethic: The Ecological Conscience

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 Land Ethic: The Outlook

One of the most insidious invasions of wilderness is via predator control. It works thus: wolves and lions are cleaned out of a wilderness area in the interest of big-game management. The big game (usually deer or elk) then increase to the point of overbrowsing the range. Hunters must then be encouraged to harvest the surplus, but modern hunters refuse to operate far from a car; hence a road must be built to provide access to the surplus game. Again and again, wilderness areas have been split by this process, but it still continues. –Wilderness: The Remnant

Even if wild spots do survive, what of their fauna? The woodland caribou, the several races of mountain sheep, the pure form of woods buffalo, the barren ground grizzly, the freshwater seals, and the whales are even now threatened. Of what use are wild areas destitute of their distinctive faunas? --Wilderness: The Remnant

Pioneers usually scoff at any effort to perpetuate pioneering. –Wilderness: The Remnant

It is bootless to execute a portage to the tune of motor launches, or to turn out your bell-mare in the pasture of a summer hotel. It is better to stay home. –Wilderness: Wilderness for Recreation

Mechanized recreation already has seized nine-tenths of the woods and mountains; a decent respect for minorities should dedicate the other tenth to wilderness. –Wilderness: Wilderness for Recreation

There seems to be a tacit assumption that if grizzlies survive in Canada and Alaska, that is good enough. It is not good enough for me. –Wilderness: Wilderness for Wildlife

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