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."

"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."

"Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important; it is such who prate of empires, political or economic, that will last a thousand years. It is only the scholar who appreciates that all history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values. It is only the scholar who understands why the raw wilderness gives definition and meaning to the human enterprise."

"The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?"

"I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness."

"One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds."