Today, January 11, is the birth date of Aldo Leopold – forester, philosopher, conservationist, educator and author.  Leopold, who was born in 1887 and died in 1948, coined the phrase “land ethic” to describe an “ethic dealing with human’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it”.  As a teenager with a growing love of the outdoors, I immersed myself in the writings of  Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Grey Owl. But Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac had a huge impact in shaping the way I see and interact with the world around me.   As you can see my copy is well worn – it goes on all my canoe trips, outdoor travels, and cottage weekends.  It’s a book you can pick up any time and read a few inspirational paragraphs, pages or chapters.

 

Here are a few of my favourite quotes of Leopold’s from Sand County and others of his writings…

“There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.”

“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.”

“Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet un-captured by language.”

“No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.”

“Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree – and there will be one.”

Leopold held some less-than-optimistic thoughts with respect to humans and nature as well, and unfortunately, to some degree, they hold as true now as they did when he penned them in the 1930’s:

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

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

“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.”

Without question, my favourite chapter in A Sand County Almanac is Sky Dance, Leopold’s eloquent description of the spring courtship ritual of the American Woodcock. Follow the link for some audio and video of this entertaining event

Happy Birthday, Aldo…