“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.”
“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.”
“Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.”
“Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.”
“To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: ‘What good is it?’”
“The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.”
“The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.”
“Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching—even when doing the wrong thing is legal.”
“In wildness is the salvation of the world.”
“We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.”
“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.”
“The goose that trades his wilderness for a pond with a park loses his soul.”
“Recreational development is a job not of building roads into the lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.”
“A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land.”
“The land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals.”
“Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets. To plant a pine, one need only own a shovel.”
“The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.”
“No one will ever know how many animals were rendered extinct by ignorance, rather than necessity.”
“The landscape of any farm is the owner’s portrait of himself.”
“Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them.”
“We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations, the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.”
“A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”
“Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.”
“Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.”
“The tragedy in conservation education lies in the fact that it tends to bypass the land.”
“There is value in any experience that reminds us of our dependency on the soil-plant-animal-man food chain.”
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
“The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.”
“A sand county almanac is not a calendar of events, but an expression of a land ethic.”
“What more substantial service to conservation than to preach the doctrine of the wild?”
“Forests are not simply collections of trees—they are communities of living beings.”
“The objective is to teach the student to see the land, to understand what he sees, and enjoy what he understands.”
“The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods.”
“The only progress that counts is that on the scale of eternity.”
“To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.”
“The 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 uncaptured by language.”
“The wilderness is our culture’s ancestral home. The more we lose it, the more lost we are.”
“Our tools have become too refined to permit us to make the necessary mistakes.”
“Wildlife is something that man cannot produce. We can only consume it.”
“The land ethic of the future hinges on the recognition of the land as a community.”
“The rush of progress threatens all the things we cherish.”
“If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.”
“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.”
“A community is defined by the interactions of its parts, and all parts are important.”
“In nature’s economy, the currency is not money, but life.”
“Wilderness is the incubator of civilization.”
“The objective of conservation is not merely to save resources but to preserve the richness of the Earth’s processes.”
“Land is a heritage that belongs as much to the unborn as to the living.”
“Every living thing has value in its own right, independent of its utility to man.”