Aldo Leopold Quotes

The principles that will save Earth's life are the same principles that save the living souls of humans: ineluctable spiritual principles.

In time, we will have to recognise that it is not 'nature' that we need to protect, but ourselves, and we can only do this by abandoning the old, grandiose, profit-seeking schemes so beloved of our masters and learning to till the soil, live to scale, and live within our means.

Act so that the effects of your actions are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life.

It must be possible to solve the task of controlling nature and yet simultaneously create a new freedom.

If you want to destroy the planet, you can kiss social justice goodbye. The earth comes first.

I feel that our planet is in peril and that creating a sustainable planet for my children and my children's children is the most important thing I can do in this lifetime.

We have an obligation to live in harmony with creation, with our capital... with God's creation. And we need to administer and work that very carefully.

We should honor Mother Earth with gratitude; otherwise our spirituality may become hypocritical.

I think we need to take responsibility for the things we put on this planet, and also take responsibility for the things we take off the planet. We need to have limiters on how far we allow ourselves to go - ethical, moral limiters.

We must guard against the overreaching hand of big government trying to take away our freedom. And we must always protect the environment in a manner consistent with our values.

If we're destroying our trees and destroying our environment and hurting animals and hurting one another and all that stuff, there's got to be a very powerful energy to fight that. I think we need more love in the world.

Ask any parent what we want for our children, and invariably we say 'a better life.' To that end, we give our time, our sleep, our money, and our dreams, much as our parents did before us. We all want a better life for our children. But what we want for them ceases to matter if we leave them an unlivable world.

The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them.

If you don't have an ethic of conservation, you basically have a license to drive a Hummer through the Amazon.

Right now, we don't have a very good relation with creation.

We owe it to each other - and to our children and grandchildren - to leave our planet in a better state than when we found it.

Earth Day should encourage us to reflect on what we are doing to make our planet a more sustainable and livable place.

If we each take responsibility in shifting our own behavior, we can trigger the type of change that is necessary to achieve sustainability for our race or this planet. We change our planet, our environment, our humanity every day, every year, every decade, and every millennia.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament.

What we've proven is that you can protect the environment, use it wisely and grow the economy and that there is no conflict between the two.

On Earth Day, we celebrate all the gifts the world and nature make available to us. We recognize our complete dependence on its bounty. And we acknowledge the need for good stewardship to preserve its fruits for future generations.

The truth is, natural organisms have managed to do everything we want to do without guzzling fossil fuels, polluting the planet or mortgaging the future.

One must do no violence to nature, nor model it in conformity to any blindly formed chimera.

We learned that economic growth and environmental protection can and should go hand in hand.