Aldo Leopold

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

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.

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

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?'

Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.

The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, but the Lord rarely taketh away the same way twice.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow.

The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, except as a field for sport or a commodity for sale.

For us of the twentieth century to see the land as a community is a step in the evolution of ethics.

The more land does not yield a living, the more it yields a culture.

To build a road is to become a god.

The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.

The 'key-log' which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem.

The only thing we can be sure of is that the future will be different.

Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how.

The problem of land-use is not merely an economic one. It is a problem of ethics.

The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces.