Aldo Leopold Quotes About Community
-
The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community, and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people.
→ -
Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. 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 is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the aesthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture
→ -
My favorite quote: The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.
→ -
One of the anomalies of modern ecology is the creation of two groups, each of which seems barely aware of the existence of the other. The one studies the human community, almost as if it were a separate entity, and calls its findings sociology, economics and history. The other studies the plant and animal community and comfortably relegates the hodge-podge of politics to the liberal arts. The inevitable fusion of these two lines of thought will, perhaps, constitute the outstanding advance of this century.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.
→ -
I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written'… It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.
→ -
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.
→ -
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.
→ -
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.
→ -
When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may see it with love and respect. - Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free.
→ -
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.
→
Related Authors
-
-
Garrett Hardin Ecologist -
John Muir Author -
Ansel Adams Photographer -
-
Sigurd F. Olson Author -
Edward Abbey Author -
Theodore Roosevelt 26th U.S. President -
Rachel Carson Marine biologist -
-
David R. Brower Environmentalist -
E. O. Wilson Biologist -
Wallace Stegner Historian -
Harvey Broome Writer -
Wendell Berry Novelist -
Henry David Thoreau Author -
Gifford Pinchot Former Governor of Pennsylvania -
Gaylord Nelson Former United States Senator -
Peter Singer Philosopher -
Annie Dillard Author