Aldo Leopold Quotes

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

When I speak of knowledge of nature, I do not mean industrial science, which argues that nature is inert and can be understood only to enable humans to manipulate it. I mean that sense of nature that Aldo Leopold had in mind when he said, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community, wrong when it tends otherwise.

A functioning eco-system is a human need.

Nature is under control but not disturbed.

Now, more than ever, we need nature as a balancing agent.

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts... The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

Biodiversity underpins life on earth. And if we don't look after this biodiversity, if we don't protect it, if we don't actually harness it in the right way, we are threatening our own livelihoods on this planet.

Nature is a beautiful thing - it does what it needs to do when it needs to do it.

All I want to do is to present the abundance of life on Earth.

The environment, what surrounds you, is so alive and delightful and complex.

Natures' curriculum cannot be changed.

The reason that I keep writing is that all my most powerful messages about the fates of wild places that I care about need to have words as well as images.

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

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.

Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans have been living for hundreds of thousands of years in their forest, living fantastic lives, never overpopulating, never destroying the forest. I would say that they have been in a way more successful than us as far as being in harmony with the environment.

Of course, the plea for respect for nonhuman life goes far beyond the scientific delight of familiarity with our planet mates. The nonhuman forms of life with which we 6,000 million talking, upright apes share this finite planet are directly or indirectly connected to our well-being.

Nature is perfect.

People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure.

I don't believe in messing with mother-nature too much.

Unless action is taken soon - unless we can display the same vision of that earlier period - we will lose the treasure of California's open space and environmental beauty.

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

I take a biocentric point of view. I look at things from the point of view of the Earth and the laws of ecology. As opposed to the anthropocentric point of view, where everything revolves around humanity.

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

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..

True conservation means protecting the entire habitat.