Monday, 9 July 2012

Aldo Leopold - ‘The Conservation Ethic’

We of the machine age admire ourselves for our mechanical ingenuity; we harness cars to the solar energy impounded in carboniferous forests; we fly in mechanical birds; we make the ether carry our words or even our pictures. But are these not in one sense mere parlor tricks compared with our utter ineptitude in keeping land fit to live upon? Our engineering has attained the pearly gates of a near millennium, but our applied biology still lives in nomad’s tents of the Stone Age. If our system of land-use happens to be self-perpetuating, we stay. If it happens to be self-destructive we move, like Abraham, to pastures new.
 
This weeks Green Thought comes from ‘The Conservation Ethic’ – an essay written in 1933 by Aldo Leopold. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldo_Leopold

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