Aldo Leopold was an environmentalist best known for writing A Sand County Almanac, a formative collection of essays that reshaped the way we think about conservation and ecology. While many of his predecessors viewed conservation through a utilitarian lens, Leopold advocated for a concept he called the “land ethic.” This proposed moral code suggested that humans aren’t conquerors of the land, but rather equal members of the Earth along with animals, plants, water, and soil.
After developing a keen interest in nature at a young age Leopold went on to join the U.S. Forest Service as an adult. In the early 1920s, he played an instrumental role in establishing the Gila Wilderness area in New Mexico, the world’s first federally protected wilderness area.
Leopold also spent much of his life hunting and learning many lessons about how to best manage and restore wildlife populations. He used those lessons to write the 1933 work Game Management, and in the same year, he became the first chair of the Department of Game Management at the University of Wisconsin (a position the university created for him). Two years later Leopold founded the Wilderness Society, a nonprofit land conservation organization, as he continued to gain clout throughout the environmental world.
Leopold wrote many essays that encouraged his fellow humans to approach their place in the world with humility and curiosity. Here are 12 quotes from Leopold himself about conservation, and the ways in which all of us should care for our surroundings.
Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges … The land is one organism.
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.
That the situation is hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.
We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve, but to strive.
Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down … to a question of intellectual humility.
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.
There are degrees and kinds of solitude … I know of no solitude so secure as one guarded by a spring flood; nor do the geese, who have seen more kinds and degrees of aloneness than I have.
Our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy.
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.
Bread and beauty grow best together. Their harmonious integration can make farming not only a business but an art; the land not only a food-factory but an instrument for self-expression, on which each can play music to his own choosing.
Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.
The last word of ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.
Featured image credit: Everett Collection Historical/ Alamy Stock Photo
