Aldo Leopold Quotes

Hunting, fishing, and trapping is literally perfect. It's the perfect system by which to balance and ground the animal populations for next year's productivity.

I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.

Heartless though it may seem to some, among the least harmful things to eat are sustainably culled wild animals. In the absence of natural predators, deer populations in parts of Britain have reached such dense numbers that the woodlands they browse fail to regenerate.

There is much concern these days about the taking of wild animals for sport, but against that must be placed the protection given to wild habitats and many other wild species in the process of keeping game … as with everything in nature, it is all a question of balance and this balance can only be achieved by knowledge and understanding …

For almost two centuries, American gray wolves, vilified in fact as well as fiction, were the victims of vicious government extermination programs. By the time the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, only a few hundred of these once-great predators were left in the lower 48 states.

We have now felled forest enough everywhere, in many districts far too much. Let us restore this one element of material life to its normal proportions, and devise means for maintaining the permanence of its relations to the fields, the meadows and the pastures, to the rain and the dews of heaven, to the springs and rivulets with which it waters down the earth.

University convention submerges nature. It issues licenses, and hunting without one is forbidden.

For great many species today, fitness means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force.

If he had unlimited money at his disposal, he might go into the wilds somewhere and shoot big game. I never know what the big game have done to deserve it, but they do help to deflect the destructive energies of some of our social misfits.

In a civilized and cultivated country, wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen.

I totally disagree with the belief that nature was only made for the use of people. Human beings are not the center of the universe, and, if they are to sustain themselves, it is vitally important for them to be awakened to how closely they are linked with the rest of nature.

If we want foxes, to observe and delight in, we must have hunting.

Dating back to Teddy Roosevelt, hunters have been the pillar of conservation in America, doing more than anyone to conserve wildlife and its habitat.

... all professional ideologies are high-minded. Hunters, for instance, would not dream of calling themselves the butchers of the woods.

We humans still have a long way to go with learning to live harmoniously with our environment and its wildlife.

Humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. [With de-extinction,] we have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage.

The creatures that want to live a life of their own, we call wild. If wild, then no matter how harmless, we treat them as outlaws, and those of us who are specially well brought up shoot them for fun.

I was interested in the environment from when I was a little kid. I spent most of my time hunting and fishing and kayaking.

Economy without ecology means managing the human nature relationship without knowing the delicate balance between humankind and the natural world

If we [humans] disappeared overnight, the world would probably be better off.

It's true: Every time you kill an elk, you're saving some cow's life.

And this is what happened, ands this is why the caribou and the wolf are one; for the caribou feeds the wolf, but it is the wolf that keeps the caribou strong.

There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.

Nature is reminding us that it used to exist without human beings.

But, on more accounts than one, I had had enough of moose-hunting. I had not come to the woods for this purpose, nor had I foreseen it, though I had been willing to learn how the Indian manvred; but one moose killed was as good, if not as bad, as a dozen.