Obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to land. No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions. The proof that conservation has not yet touched these foundations of conduct lies in the fact that philosophy and religion have not yet heard of it. In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.

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We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.

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Our education and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow.

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..We see repeated the same basic paradoxes: man the conqueror versus man the biotic citizen; science the sharperner of his sword versus science the searchlight on his universe; land the slave and servant versus land the collective organism. Robinson’s injunction to Tristram may well be applied, at this juncture, to Homo sapiens as a species in geological time:

Whether you will or not
You are a King, Tristram, for you are one
Of the time-tested few that leave the world,
When they are gone, not the same place it was
Mark what you leave.

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I wonder how Aldo Leopold would feel if he could see the world now. More than 60 years on, we’ve barely improved, and are hardly taking up anything he prescribed. He’s probably rolling over in his grave.