Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold
Aldo Leopold
Born	11 January 1887(1887-01-11) Burlington, Iowa
Died	21 April 1948 (aged 61) Wisconsin
Occupation	author, ecologist, forester, and environmentalist
Nationality	American
Subjects	Conservation, land ethic, land health, ecological conscience
Notable work(s)	A Sand County Almanac
Spouse(s)	Estella Leopold
Children	A. Starker Leopold, Luna B. Leopold, Nina Leopold Bradley, A. Carl Leopold, Estella Leopold

Aldo Leopold (January 11, 1887 – April 21, 1948) was an American ecologist, forester, and environmentalist. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin and is best known for his book A Sand County Almanac (1949), which sold over a million copies. Influential in the development of modern environmental ethics and in the movement for wilderness conservation, his ethics of nature and wildlife preservation had a profound impact on the left wing of the environmental movement, with his biocentric or holistic ethics regarding land. He emphasized biodiversity and ecology and was a founder of the science of wildlife management.^[1]

Life and work

In 1909, Leopold, a recent graduate of the Yale Forest School, was assigned to the Forest Service's District 3 in the Arizona and New Mexico territories. He was first a forest assistant at the Apache National Forest in the Arizona Territory. In 1911, he was transferred to the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico. Leopold's career, which kept him in New Mexico until 1924, included developing the first comprehensive management plan for the Grand Canyon, writing the Forest Service's first game and fish handbook, and proposing Gila Wilderness Area, the first national wilderness area in the Forest Service system.^[2]

In 1933 he was appointed Professor of Game Management in the Agricultural Economics Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the first such professorship of wildlife management.

He purchased eighty acres in the sand country of central Wisconsin. The once-forested region had been logged, swept by repeated fires, overgrazed by dairy cows, and left barren. There he put his theories to work in the field, and eventually authored his best-selling A Sand County Almanac (1949), which he finished just before his death. He lived in a modest two-story home close to the campus with his wife and children. One of his sons, Luna, went on to become a noted hydrologist and geology professor at UC Berkeley. Another son, A. Starker Leopold, was a noted wildlife biologist and also a professor at UC Berkeley.^[3] A third son, A. Carl Leopold, became a noted plant physiologist^[4] and he taught at the university until his death. Today, Leopold's home is an official landmark of the city of Madison.

Ideas

Early on Leopold was assigned to hunt and kill bears, wolves, and mountain lions in New Mexico. Local ranchers hated these predators because of livestock losses. However, Leopold came to respect the animals. He developed an ecological ethic that replaced the earlier "colonial Judeo-Christian wilderness ethic." Rethinking the importance of predators in the balance of nature resulted in the return of bears and mountain lions to New Mexico wilderness areas.^[5]

By the early 1920s, Leopold had concluded that a particular kind of preservation should be embraced in the national forests of the American West. He was prompted to this by the rampant building of roads to accommodate the "proliferation of the automobile" and the related increasingly heavy recreational demands placed on public lands. He was the first to employ the term wilderness to describe such preservation. Over the next two decades he added ethical and scientific rationales to his defense of the wilderness concept. In one essay, he rhetorically asked "Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?" Leopold saw a progress of ethical sensitivity from interpersonal relationships to relationships to society as a whole to relationships with the land, leading to a steady diminution of actions based on expediency, conquest, and self-interest. Leopold thus rejected the utilitarianism of conservationists like Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt.^[6]

By the 1930s Leopold was the nation's foremost expert on wildlife management. He advocated the scientific management of wildlife habitats by both public and private landholders rather than a reliance on game refuges, hunting laws, and other methods intended to protect specific species of desired game. Leopold viewed view wildlife management as a technique for restoring and maintaining diversity in the environment rather than primarily as a means of producing a shootable surplus.^[7]

The concept of "wilderness" also took on a new meaning; he no longer saw it as a hunting or recreational ground but as an arena for a healthy biotic community, including wolves and mountain lions. in 1935 he helped found the Wilderness Society, dedicated to expanding and protecting the nation's wilderness areas. He regarded the society as "one of the focal points of a new attitude—an intelligent humility toward man's place in nature."^[8]

Nature writing

His nature writing is notable for its simple directness. His portrayals of various natural environments through which he had moved, or had known for many years, displayed impressive intimacy with what exists and happens in nature. Leopold offered frank criticism of the harm he believed was frequently done to natural systems (such as land) out of a sense of a culture or society's sovereign ownership over the land base – eclipsing any sense of a community of life to which humans belong. He felt the security and prosperity resulting from "mechanization" now gives people the time to reflect on the preciousness of nature and to learn more about what happens there. However, he also writes "Theoretically, the mechanization of farming ought to cut the farmer's chains, but whether it really does is debatable."^[9]

A Sand County Almanac

The book was published in 1949, shortly after Leopold's death. One of the well-known quotes from the book which clarifies his land ethic is

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. (p.240)

The concept of a trophic cascade is put forth in the chapter "Thinking Like a Mountain", wherein Leopold realizes that killing a predator wolf carries serious implications for the rest of the ecosystem.^[10]

In January of 1995 I helped carry the first grey wolf into Yellowstone, where they had been eradicated by federal predator control policy only six decades earlier. Looking through the crates into her eyes, I reflected on how Aldo Leopold once took part in that policy, then eloquently challenged it. By illuminating for us how wolves play a critical role in the whole of creation, he expressed the ethic and the laws which would reintroduce them nearly a half-century after his death.

– Bruce Babbitt, former Secretary of the Interior^[11]

Conservation

In "The Land Ethic", a chapter of A Sand County Almanac, Leopold delves into conservation in "The Ecological Conscience" section. He wrote: "Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land." According to him, curriculum-content guidelines in the late 1940s, when he wrote boiled down to: "obey the law, vote right, join some organizations and practice what conservation is profitable on your own land; the government will do the rest."(p.243-244)

See also

• Timeline of environmental events
• Land Ethic
• Sand County Foundation
• Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies
• Aldo Leopold Legacy Trail System

Notes

References

• Callicott, J. Baird, ed. Companion to A Sand County Almanac: Interpretive and Critical Essays. (1987). 308 pp.
• Errington, P.L. 1948. "In Appreciation of Aldo Leopold". The Journal of Wildlife Management. 12(4)
• Flader, Susan L. Thinking like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude toward Deer, Wolves, and Forests (1974)
• Flader, Susan L. The Sand Country of Aldo Leopold (1973).
• Knight, Richard L. and Suzanne Riedel (ed). 2002. Aldo Leopold and the Ecological Conscience. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195149440.
• Lorbiecki, Marybeth. 1996. Aldo Leopold: A Fierce Green Fire. Helena, Mont.: Falcon Press. ISBN 1560444789.
• McClintock, James I. 1994. Nature's Kindred Spirits. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 0299141748.
• Meine, Curt. 1988. Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 0299114902. the standard biography
• Newton, Julianne Lutz. 2006. Aldo Leopold's Odyssey. Washington: Island Press/Shearwater Books. ISBN 9781597260459.
• Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind, (3rd ed. 1982)
• Strong, Douglas H. Dreamers & Defenders: American Conservationists. (1988) ch 6 online edition
• Tanner, Thomas, ed. Aldo Leopold: The Man and His Legacy (1987).

Primary sources

• Leopold, Aldo. Aldo Leopold's Wilderness: Selected Early Writings by the Author of A Sand County Almanac. ed. by David E. Brown and Neil B. Carmony, (1990). 249 pp.
• Leopold, Aldo. The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays. ed. by Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott, (1991). 384 pp.
• Leopold, Aldo. Game Management (1933, reprint 1986)481 pp.
• Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac (1949, numerous later editions)

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Aldo Leopold

• Aldo Leopold Foundation
• Leopold Heritage Group
• The Aldo Leopold Archives Digitized archival materials held by the University of Wisconsin–Madison Archives.
• Leopold Conservation Award
• Excerpts from the Works of Aldo Leopold
• Works by or about Aldo Leopold in libraries (WorldCat catalog)