“One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value. Wildflowers and songbirds are examples. Of the 22,000 higher plants and animals native to Wisconsin, it is doubtful whether more than 5 per cent can be sold, fed, eaten, or otherwise put to economic use. Yet these creatures are members of the biotic community, and if (as I believe) its stability depends on its integrity, they are entitled to continuance.”

— Aldo Leopold , book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "The Land Ethic", p. 210.

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Aldo Leopold 130

American writer and scientist 1887–1948

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“Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. 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.”

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Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "The Land Ethic", p. 224-225.

“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.”

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Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "The Land Ethic", p. 224-225.
Source: A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
Context: Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. 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.

“In India, no power plant runs beyond 58 per cent of its capacity. I believe instead of making yet another plant which is really disastrous, what you should do first is to go in for conservation - that is increase your 58 per cent to 90 per cent. Your power problem would be solved right there.”

Maneka Gandhi (1956) Indian politician and activist

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“One of the symptoms of a declining social order is that its members have to give most of their time to politics, rather than to the real tasks of economic production, in an attempt to patch up the cracks already appearing from the 'inner contradictions' of such a system.”

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“Communism draws its strength from deeper, more serious sources. Offered to us as a means of improving the economic situation, it is an insult to our intelligence. But offered as a means of making the economic situation worse, that is its subtle, its almost irresistible, attraction. Communism is not a reaction against the failure of the nineteenth century to organize optimal economic output. It is a reaction against its comparative success.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

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“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. … 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.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

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“It is one of the unhappy incidents of the federal system that a self-righteous Supreme Court, acting on its Members' personal view of what would make a 'more perfect Union' (a criterion only slightly more restrictive than a 'more perfect world') can impose its own favored social and economic dispositions nationwide.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

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Gregor Strasser (1892–1934) German politician, rival of Adolf Hitler inside the Nazi Psrty

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Ray Lyman Wilbur (1875–1949) President of Stanford University

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Aldo Leopold 130

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