Aldo Leopold Quotes

To sustain an environment suitable for man, we must fight on a thousand battlegrounds. Despite all of our wealth and knowledge, we cannot create a redwood forest, a wild river, or a gleaming seashore.

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.

Congress has an obligation to protect our country's natural beauty, embodied in our nation's parks, rivers, and breathtaking landscapes.

The quicker we humans learn that saving open space and wildlife is critical to our welfare and quality of life, maybe we'll start thinking of doing something about it.

True conservation means protecting the entire habitat.

The people of each generation perceive the state of the ecosystems they encountered in their childhood as normal and natural. When wildlife is depleted, we might notice the loss, but we are unaware that the baseline by which we judge the decline is in fact a state of extreme depletion.

The immediate need for education and practice in using our natural resources of soil, forest, water, wildlife and areas of inspirational beauty to the best advantage of all, for this generation and others to come, is again apparent to every observant citizen.

We're at risk of losing this iconic species for all time. Once it's stripped of its natural instincts, it's no longer a tiger. But there's a lot of species like that. The more intriguing thing, throughout Asia, a lot of these countries are selling off their jungle-and-forest rights for oil and for paper-and-pulp companies.

For him nature is basically a golf course or a ranch--or a national park turned into a country club where folks can burn off stress by speeding over the snow while polluting the air of Yellowstone with gas-guzzling skidoos.

The free market should not include the right to pollute our environment.

Only when the last tree has withered, and the last fish caught, and the last river been poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.

A nation that derives its subsistence, principally from the forest, cannot live in the vicinity of one that relies upon the products of the field. The clearing of the country drives off the wild beasts; and when the game fails, the hunter must starve, change his occupation, or retire from the approach of cultivation.

… as a nation we haven't expected our government to show foresight in the development of the land. We have allowed individuals to do as they thought best and they could hardly be expected to have an altruistic attitude on the future. Now we are faced with lands that must be returned to buffalo grass or trees in order to prevent the suffering which many of our people are enduring today. All of us will gladly help in the emergency but I hope we will do more than that, and set ourselves to studying the things which have caused these conditions and never rest until our government remedies them.

Tropical rain forests, as well as tropical and temperate dry forests, are being destroyed rapidly. At present rates, some critical forest types will be gone in a few years, and most of the tropical rain forest will be gone before the end of the next century. With them will go large numbers of plant and animal species.

If I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like.

The whole of nature cries out at our mistreatment of her. If the planet were a patient, we would have treated her long ago.

Agriculture changes the landscape more than anything else we do. It alters the composition of species. We don't realize it when we sit down to eat, but that is our most profound engagement with the rest of nature.

I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things, they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness.

In the 19th and 20th centuries we saw nature as something to use to our profit, but the attitude of man towards nature in the 21st century will be a bit different.

Mississippians for the most part appreciate U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service management of our wildlife refuges and other natural resources.

Yellowstone wildlife is treasured. We understand that. We'll manage them in a way that addresses that sensitivity.

Wildlife film-makers I know tell me that the effort to portray what looks like an untouched ecosystem becomes harder every year. They have to choose their camera angles ever more carefully to exclude the evidence of destruction, travel further to find the Edens they depict.

The protection of biodiversity and, therefore, of endangered species is an issue to which I attach a great deal of importance.

In my life, I have dreamt of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rainforests full of birds and butterflies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.

We can see the weather change, that the birds don't come to the city anymore... we seriously have to think about preserving nature.