Aldo Leopold People Quotations

Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism.

There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.

Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.

It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.

In country, as in people, a plain exterior often conceals hidden riches, to perceive which requires much living in and with.

Barring love and war, few enterprises are undertaken with such abandon, or by such diverse individuals, or with so paradoxical a mixture of appetite and altruism, as that group of avocations known as outdoor recreation. It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature. But wherein lies the goodness, and what can be done to encourage its pursuit?

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, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education.