Aldo Leopold (1887 – 1948)
United States wildlife biologist and conservationist.
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.
An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation. The ecologist calls these symbioses. Politics and economics are advanced symbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been replaced, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content.
A profession is a body of men who voluntarily measure their work by a higher standard than their clients demand. To be professionally acceptable, a policy must be sound as well as salable. Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.
To the mouse, snow means freedom from want and fear. ... To a rough-legged hawk, a thaw means freedom from want and fear.
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.
If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left, in my opinion, worth fighting for; or to be more exact, a completely industrialized United States is of no consequence to me.
Conservation is not merely a thing to be enshrined in outdoor museums, but a way of living on land.
When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.
Science contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world. Its great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view. This means doubting everything except facts; it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may.
Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.
An ethic to supplement and guide the economic relation to land presupposes the existence of some mental image of land as a biotic mechanism.
Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you.
Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching — even when doing the wrong thing is legal.
We speak glibly of conservation education, but what do we mean by it? If we mean indoctrination, then let us be reminded that it is just as easy to indoctrinate with fallacies as with facts. If we mean to teach the capacity for independent judgement, then I am appalled by the magnitude of the task.
Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility.
During every week from April to September there are, on the average, ten wild plants coming into first bloom. ... No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them. ... Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education.
The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler. ... 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.
Land-use ethics are still governed wholly by economic self-interest, just as social ethics were a century ago.
Patriotism requires less and less of making the eagle scream, but more and more of making him think.
The direction is clear, and the first step is to throw your weight around on matters of right and wrong in land-use. Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays. That philosophy is dead in human relations, and its funeral in land-relations is overdue.