HERE MUST be some force behind conservation more universal than profit, less awkward than government, less ephemeral than sport, something that reaches into all time and places where men live on land, something that brackets everything, from rivers to raindrops, from whales to hummingbirds, from land estates to window boxes.I can see only one such force: a respect for land as an organism; a voluntary decency in land-use exercised by every citizen and every landowner out of a sense of love for and obligation to that great biota we call America. This is the meaning of conservation and this is the task of conservation education.
(“A Sand County Almanac,” by Aldo Leopold, 1949.)
