Leopold, Aldo
Aldo Leopold was born in 1887. He joined the U. S. Forest Service in 1909. He was one of the founders of the Wilderness Society, and initiated in 1924 the first Forest Wilderness Area of the United States - the Gila National Forest. During the last years of his life he lived in Wisconsin, where the University of Wisconsin created a chair of game management for him. He died in 1948 while fighting a brush fire on a neighbor's farm.
We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River, 1949.
An 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. Ibid.
A March morning is only as drab as he who walks in it without a glance skyward, ear cocked for geese. Ibid.
The ecstatic upland plover, hovering overhead, poured praises on something perfect: perhaps the eggs, perhaps the shadows, or perhaps the haze of pink phlox that lay on the prairie. Ibid.
. . . goose flocks are families, or aggregations of families, and lone geese in spring are probably just what our fond imaginationings had first suggested. They are bereaved survivors of the winter's shooting, searching in vain for their kin. Now I am free to grieve with and for the lone honkers. Ibid.
Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals. Ibid.
Food chains are the living channels which conduct energy upward; death and decay return it to the soil. Ibid.
Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words. Ibid.
A thing is right when it when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. Ibid.
Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals. Ibid.
Plants absorb energy from the sun. This energy flows through a circuit called the biota, which may be represented by a pyramid consisting of layers. The bottom layer is the soil. A plant layer rests on the soil, an insect layer of the plants, a bird and rodent layer on the insects, and so on up through various animal groups to the apex layer, which consists of the larger carnivores. Ibid.
Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. Ibid.
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. Ibid.
And what an odd term 'developer' is, as he does not develop but instead destroys what has developed through a billion years of evolution. Ibid.
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes&endash;something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch: I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, no wolves would mean a hunter's paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view. Ibid.
Despite nearly a century of propaganda, conservation still proceeds at a snail's pace; progress still consists largely of letterhead pieties and convention oratory . . . Ibid.