Aldo Leopold Quotes

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

Land is not merely soil.

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.

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.

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..

Land use is becoming more and more a general national interest and should be as much a study in the cities as in the country. For with the proper use of land, many of our greatest troubles—dust storms, floods, over-production of this and that, would at least be measurably controlled.

America’s forests and waters must come into the hands of not a few men who speculate in them, but be distributed among many men, each of whom intends to make a home upon the land.

Attention! Land Thieves and Natural Resources Grabbers …. Under [Theodore] Roosevelt any doubt about the power of the Chief Executive to make withdrawals of public land was resolved in favor of the people.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

We've raped our homelands to maintain our economies.

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.

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

The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it..

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.”

… 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.

We see that the environment is something to exploit, because we see the environment in terms of minerals for example, or forests, or even raw materials that we produce on our land, or even land itself. We see it in terms of what we can exploit rather than the medium in which all of these activities have to take place.

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 people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers.

If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.

Fossil fuels and mining is a short-term gambit. If we develop those resources at the expense of the environmental gold mine that is the Great Barrier Reef, we will all lose in the long run.

While our budget shortfall is temporary, ruining pristine national lands is permanent.

Rainforest land is mistakenly valued solely for the worth of its timber, mining and oil resources by short-sighted corporations and governments.

I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend?

Our settlement of land is without regard to the best use of land.

The natural capital is not income, but we spend our natural capital as if it were revenue, as if it were going to come back next year without any problems, whereas these renewals in nature can take hundreds of years.