Aldo Leopold (1887 – 1948)
United States wildlife biologist and conservationist.
The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land, but not by the land.
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.
Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.
In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.
We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, 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 in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.
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.
Patriotism requires less and less of making the eagle scream, but more and more of making him think.
Land-use ethics are still governed wholly by economic self-interest, just as social ethics were a century ago.
[After describing a hopper for feeding winter game:] If you think you're too old to enjoy building such contraptions — that only Boy Scouts get a kick out of such nonsense — just try it. You may end up by building several.