Notable Ecologists, Environmentalists, & Conservationists Posters “L...-”
for science & social studies classrooms, home schoolers, offices.

Aldo Leopold
Karl Linneaus

Barry Lopez
James Lovelock

Aldo Leopold
b. 1-11-1887; Burlington, Iowa
d. 4-21-1948; Baraboo, Wisconsin

Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac is one of the most influential nature books.

Aldo Leopold quotes ~
• “Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching – even when doing the wrong thing is legal.”
• “That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.”
• “The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.”
• “We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.”
• “Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.”
• “I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.”
• “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”
• “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

• “Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
• “Harmony with the land is like harmony with a friend, you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.”
• “The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
• “One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.”
• “The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry. The stalks hum,
the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playing swirls, and the wind hurries on....
A tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind.”

Carl Linnaeus
b. 5-13-1707; Sweden
d. 1-10-1778; Uppsala

Carl Linnaeus, also known as Carolus Linnaeus (Latinized) and Carl von Linné (after ennoblement), was a botanist, physician and zoologist. He is recognized as the “Father of Modern Taxonomy”, and one of the fathers of modern ecology.

Linnaeus' contribution to science is the binary nomenclature, a formal system of naming species with a Latin name in two parts: first genus, then a specific description, ie. Rangifer tarandus for the reindeer.

• Animal Kingdom poster

Barry Lopez
b. 1-6-1945; Port Chester, NY

Author, essayist, and fiction writer Barry Lopez examines environmental and social concerns through the relationship between human culture and the physical landscape.

Barry Lopez quotes ~
• “Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”
• “Would the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?”
• “How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”
• “What does it mean to grow rich? – Is it to have red-blooded adventures and to make a ‘fortune,’ which is what brought the whalers and other entrepreneurs north? – Or is it, rather, to have a good family life and to be imbued with a far-reaching and intimate knowledge of one’s homeland, which is what the Tununirmiut told the whalers at Pond’s Bay wealth was? – Is it to retain a capacity for awe and astonishment in our lives, to continue to hunger after what is genuine and worthy? Is it to live at moral peace with the universe?” Artic Dreams

James Lovelock
b. 7-26-1919; England

Scientist, environmentalist and futurologist James Lovelock is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, postulating that the biosphere is a self-regulating entity with the capacity to keep our planet healthy by controlling the chemical and physical environment.

Lovelock has also endorsed nuclear energy and fracking, and dislikes wind power. Really, search the web ...

FYI ~ Author William Golding recommended that Lovelock call the theory Gaia after the Greek goddess of the Earth.

James Lovelock quotes ~
• “Our planet ... consists largely of lumps of fall-out from a star-sized hydrogen bomb ... Within our bodies, no less than three million atoms rendered unstable in that event still erupt every minute, releasing a tiny fraction of the energy stored from that fierce fire of long ago.”
• “In the current fashionable denigration of technology, it is easy to forget that nuclear fission is a natural process. If something as intricate as life can assemble by accident, we need not marvel at the fission reactor, a relatively simple contraption, doing likewise.”
• “The climate and the chemical properties of the Earth now and throughout its history seem always to have been optimal for life. For this to have happened by chance is as unlikely as to survive unscathed a drive blindfold through rush hour traffic.”
• “We have since defined Gaia as a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.”

Amory Lovins
b. 11-13-1947; Washington, DC

Amory Lovins, director of the Rocky Mountain Institute, promotes energy efficiency, the use of renewable energy sources, and the generation of energy at or near the site where the energy is actually used.

Lovins former wife, Hunter, is also a noted environmental activist.

Amory Lovins quotes ~
• “Today we have a temporary aberration called “industrial capitalism” which is inadvertently liquidating its two most important sources of capital ... the natural world and properly functioning societies. No sensible capitalist would do that.”
• “If you ask the wrong question, of course, you get the wrong answer. We find in design it’s much more important and difficult to ask the right question. Once you do that, the right answer becomes obvious.”
• “In the model that we grew up with, governments rule physical territory in which national economies function, and strong economies support hegemonic military power. In the new model, already emerging under our noses, economic decisions don’t pay much attention to national sovereignty in a world where more than half of the one hundred or two hundred largest economic entities are not countries but companies.”
• “Economies are supposed to serve human ends ... not the other way round. We forget at our peril that markets make a good servant, a bad master and a worse religion.”
• “I once met an economist who believed that everything was fungible for money, so I suggested he enclose himself in a large bell-jar with as much money as he wanted and see how long he lasted.”