Aldo Leopold

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.

If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left worth fighting for.

"There are some of us who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.  For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese or wild flowers is a right as inalienable as free speech."

 "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."

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.

This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. . . . On a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen . . . and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it - a vast pulsing harmony - its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.

In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.

One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.

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.