ALDO LEOPOLD ON DARWIN February 24, 2007
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Also Leopold wrote in 1947: “It is now a century since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of the species. We now know what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise…. Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.”
ALDO LEOPOLD ON HISTORY February 24, 2007
Posted by thenaturalist in Aldo Leopold, History, Time.add a comment
Also Leopold had an interesting view of history as not linear but successive. He said, “All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.”
ALDO LEOPOLD ON SCIENCE February 24, 2007
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On the subject of science, Aldo Leopold wrote: “We doubt whether science can claim the credit for bigger and better tools, comforts, and securities without also claiming the credit for bigger and better erosions, denudations, and pollutions…. The definitions of science written by, let us say, the National Academy [of Sciences] deal almost exclusively with the creation and exercise of power. But what about the creation and exercise of wonder, or respect for workmanship in nature?” He went on to say, “If science cannot lead us to wisdom as well as power, it is surely no science at all…. We end, I think, at what might be called the standard paradox of the twentieth century: our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides. But they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.”
