Aldo Leopold Quotes

If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

The future will either be green or not at all.

Conservation of land and conservation of people frequently go hand in hand

We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Unless we keep this planet healthy, everything else is for naught.

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.

I'm very concerned for the future of the earth and its amazing creatures. We've got to be careful and make sure we don't foul our own nest.

This Earth is our only home. Together, we must protect and cherish it.

The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

I maintain that if there is such a thing as a true and honest environmentalist, it's people like Slim and hopefully me, who have been caretakers of the land all our lives, along with the generations before us.

Sooner or later, we will have to recognise that the Earth has rights, too, to live without pollution. What mankind must know is that human beings cannot live without Mother Earth, but the planet can live without humans.

The most important environmental issue is one that is rarely mentioned, and that is the lack of a conservation ethic in our culture.

We must not be the generation responsible for irreversibly damaging the environment. We must hand it over to our children in as near pristine condition as we were lent it from our parents.

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

In many developing countries environmental problems are relegated to the periphery because they do not appear to be as urgent as other issues … We cannot survive without clean drinking water, food and pure air. Environmental concerns are not a luxury in Africa.

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect

The great task for environmental historians is to record and analyze the effects of man's recently achieved control over the natural world. What is needed is a longer-term global, comparative, historical perspective that treats the environment as a meaningful variable.

In the long term the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it is unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is a rule of nature.

Conservation must become before recreation.

Our performance should be based on the long-term health of the land, rather than the number of board feet produced.

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics..

God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas…. God said “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”