A Quote by Aldo Leopold
Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.
Related Quotes
In Kenya, one of our biggest exports is coffee. Where do you grow coffee? You grow coffee in the land. To be able to grow coffee you need rain, you need special kinds of soils that are found on hillsides, and that means you have to protect that land from soil erosion so you don't lose the soil. You also want to make sure that when the rains come you're going to be able to hold that water and have it go into the ground so that the streams and the rivers keep flowing and the ground is relatively humid for these plants.
Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
My favorite quote: The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.
To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals. And so it appears that most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures are the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry.
It takes the same energy to complain as it does to compliment. When there is a short circuit, there is a complaint, and when the energy is flowing, there is a compliment.
Literatures, like trees and plants, are born of a land and in it flourish and die. But literatures, also like plants, may be carried abroad to take root in a foreign soil.
When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?
Gardeners know that you must nourish the soil if you want healthy plants. You must water the plants adequately, especially when seeds are germinating and sprouting, and they should be planted in a nutrient-rich soil. Why should nutrition matter less in the creation of young humans than it does in young plants? I'm sure that it doesn't.
There is yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.
And the thing which is missing is love, some feeling for, as well as some understanding of, the inclusive community of rocks and soils, plants and animals, of which we are a part.
China's use of 'night soil,' as the Chinese rightly call a manure that is collected after dark, is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations - the Maya, for one - floundered when their soils turned to dust.
We can look at the way of improving the key biochemical processes like photosynthesis itself. A lot of energy is lost to keep the plant cool. So maybe we can think of building plants which are more resistant to heat. Genetically modified plants can be one answer and we can imagine more efficient plants, call them 'energy plants'. And I believe, contrary to what ecologists think, they can still be beautiful plants.
You told me once of the plants that lie dormant through the drought, that wait, half-dead, deep in the earth. The plants that wait for the rain. You said they'd wait for years, if they had to; that they'd almost kill themselves before they grew again. But as soon as those first drops of water fall, those plants begin to stretch and spread their roots. They travel up through the soil and sand to reach the surface. There's a chance for them again.
It is a fact that plants also have life like animals. But animals are endowed with mind, and nervous systems too while the plants do not possess the same.
The magic begins in you. Feel your own energy, and realize similar energy exists within the Earth, stones, plants, water, wind, fire, colores, and animals.
Related Authors
Bill McKibben Quotes
American
Environmentalist
David R. Brower Quotes
American
Environmentalist
Donella Meadows Quotes
American
Environmentalist
Garrett Hardin Quotes
American
Environmentalist
Greta Thunburg Quotes
Swedish
Environmentalist
John Muir Quotes
American
Environmentalist
John Ray Quotes
English
Environmentalist
Jonathon Porritt Quotes
British
Environmentalist
Joseph Wood Krutch Quotes
American
Environmentalist
Lester R. Brown Quotes
American
Environmentalist
Luther Burbank Quotes
American
Environmentalist
Ma Jun Quotes
Chinese
Environmentalist
Paul Hawken Quotes
American
Environmentalist
Paul Watson Quotes
Canadian
Environmentalist
Richard Leakey Quotes
Kenyan
Environmentalist
Sheherazade Goldsmith Quotes
English
Environmentalist