Leopold laments the loss of wildness in this companion-piece to "Thinking Like a Mountain." He was among those who worked to tame the frontier. As a forester he mapped it, measured its weight in gold, timbered it, grazed it, and sent it downstream, but hindsight tells him the wilderness would have been more valuable left alone.
Read "Escudilla" in A Sand County Almanac
In his most famous essay, Leopold explains our relationship with the land, with the world, with life itself, and points at our blind acquiescence to the neo-classical economic paradigm. He offers a litmus test for the right use of land, a statement that has become his most oft-quoted, and tells us how to conduct ourselves as individuals and as a society.
Read "The Land Ethic" in A Sand County Almanac
In A Sand County Almanac we have the final statement, the fully ripened fruit of America's foremost conservationist cum ecologist. As with all final fruit, it reads more philosophical than ecological, more poetry than prose, more profound than professional.
The book was nearly completed when Leopold died, and was published posthumously after a heroic effort on the part of friends and family, his progeny and editors to work the manuscript into its final form. The work was finally submitted to Oxford University Press within six months of Leopold's death. Luna Leopold became editor-in-chief while Charlie Schwartz worked to complete the illustrations. After a great deal of discussion, Philip Vaudrin at Oxford prevailed in titling the book A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, which he felt grounded the book with a sense of place. Leopold had been using "Great Possessions" as his working title, but Vaudrin thought it did not convey the character of the book. Would we have bought and read and loved equally well a collection of essays called Great Possessions? That is one of those questions of the publishing world that will never be answered.
Leopold included essays that had long been a part of his bibliography along with new essays that more concisely explained his current thinking. After first conceiving of the book in 1941, he had thirteen essays arranged in this order by mid-1944: "Marshland Elegy," first published in the October 1937 issue of American Forests, is now the first essay in Part II, Sketches Here and There. "Song of the Gavilan" and "Guacama," about his travels in Chihuahua and Sonora in Mexico, and "Escudilla," now in reverse order near the end of Part II. "Smoky Gold," a hunting story that becomes the story of Leopold's love affair with Wisconsin tamaracks, is one of the earlier essays to be included in Part I, A Sand County Almanac. "Odyssey," another one of his great allegory tales, this time of natural history through atomic time travel, now placed near the beginning of Part II. "Draba," a bit of free verse that now lies in Part I. "Great Possessions," Leopold's original title piece about the disparity between reality and legality, which became the turning point essay in Part I. "The Green Lagoons" and "Illinois Bus Ride," both reflections upon travels, and "Thinking Like a Mountain," all now included in Part II. Finally, "The Geese Return," a pleasantly anthropomorphic tale of the end of Wisconsin's winters heralded by the flocks of geese.
"Good Oak" is one of the latter group, written specifically for Leopold's long-cherished notion of an illustrated book of essays in the early months of 1948. He had written "Axe-in-Hand" a few months earlier, also for the book of essays. Finally, Leopold wrote "The Land Ethic" as a capstone piece in the summer of 1947 by combining three of his most important essays written over a lifelong career in conservation along with a newly developed summary of his philosophy.
In "Good Oak," Leopold first explains the "spiritual dangers in not owning a farm." He softly chides civilization for the lack of awareness we suffer in not knowing where the essentials for life — food and heat — come from and how they come to be in our pantries and parlors. He then goes on to build a beautiful allegory for natural history, by explaining the current state of things in his neck of the woods through the rings of growth as his saw cuts through a mighty oak recently killed by lightning near the shack. By the end, he lets the reader know of his use of allegory for the telling of history, in which his saw cuts horizontally through the rings of time to display the evolution of philosophy, his wedge splits vertically across time to show the timeless nature of ideas and ideals, and his axe lops off the branches that are not now useful to his goal. Civilization becomes an ancient tree that sprouted with man's first settlement, survives the pitfalls of youth, and grows through good times and bad until a bold new idea — conservation, ecology, or even a land ethic, strikes as though hit by lightning.
"Axe-in-Hand" gives us the clearest example of Leopold's relation to Henry David Thoreau. Leopold's musing over why he should encourage one tree while another falls victim to his axe, is a perfect throwback to Thoreau's beans in Walden. Just as Thoreau writes, "It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans," Leopold is describing the thinker's capacity for discriminating between philosophical teachings. After stating that there are really only two tools — the shovel for planting trees and the axe for felling them — he says, "But there is one vocation — philosophy — which knows that all men, by what they think about and wish for, in effect wield all tools. It knows that men thus determine, by the manner of thinking and wishing, whether it is worth while to wield any." He sets the essay in November — that time of life from which a man can see enough of his own story to realize the underlying philosophy. He gives us his definition of a conservationist, "written not with a pen, but with an axe," as "one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land." Yet, is not the soul of writing contained in words left unsaid as well as those written? A good writer painstakingly edits the stream of consciousness, that row of beans, that forest, in which "not all trees are created free and equal," to present us with a unique signature upon the land of literature. A writer, too, is one "humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land."
In "Marshland Elegy," Leopold gives us a masterful turn of anthropomorphism to remind us of our place in the world. Rather than giving human characteristics to the sandhill cranes of Wisconsin's bog marshes, he sets cranes and humans on exactly the same plane, each having the capacity to know and yet not know the significance of a place and its evolution. In fact, Leopold's cranes understand evolution better than do his bureaucrats. The natural history of the crane dates back to the Eocene epoch of diversification of bird species and greater dominance of flowering plants. Through the eyes of the crane we see that all succession is as a sudden bloom when land is disturbed, but the seeds of that succession were watered by ancient inland seas. Leopold understands the present as a datum point in evolution, not a discontinuous point that has no origin and no destiny. Finally, he speaks of the paradox of wilderness, "for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish." Think about this the next time you hike — even drive — through designated wilderness.
In "Thinking Like a Mountain" we have Leopold's great admission to past mistakes in predator control. He had been prodded by former student Albert Hochbaum to write an apology piece, one that would show how Leopold, "followed trails like anyone else that lead you up the wrong alleys." Leopold had been as enthusiastic as anyone else about exterminating wolves and mountain lions from deer range, but had lived to see the range destroyed by too many deer. More than that, he had lived to see the beauty in the predator itself, its place within the ecosystem, and man's inability to fully fathom the intricate workings of ecology. He says he was "young and full of trigger-itch," which is undoubtedly true, but he was actually young and zealously devoted to game management, willing to sacrifice anything for the benefit of game animals — deer, pheasants, and waterfowl — and their human hunters. Unfortunately, he discovered through the devastation of deer range in the forests of the Southwest that the predator is as important to the ecosystem as the prey on which it feeds or the flora upon which the prey feed. He saw through the paradox of wilderness to the core of Thoreau's dictum — "In wildness is the salvation of the world." A fact still lost upon civilization.
"Escudilla" is a companion piece to "Thinking Like a Mountain," in which Leopold paints the looming mountain as the wildness that constantly threatens the safety of its human inhabitants. Progress, too, is a looming mountain that threatens each and every one of us. He admits again of his role in the demise of wilderness in the name of conservation. He relates his role in the Forest Service taming (murdering) of ecosystems to that of the early conquistadors taming (murdering) of Native Americans, and forces us to question our own actions in taming the world we inhabit. Escudilla looms over Leopold as a reminder of his own guilt in killing the deer range. But every generation has its own Escudilla, a mountain looming over us, reminding us of our own peculiar guilt in the destruction of wilderness.
"The Land Ethic" is Leopold's crowning glory as a conservationist, an ecologist, and a philosopher. It is here, with this carefully crafted piece, that Leopold brings his triune nature together into one coherent thought — an ecological ethic in which philosophy and ecology finally merge into their inevitable unity. He presents land as a community in which man is simply a member, not the overlord. He simultaneously simplifies and expands our concept of community by inclusion of the land, the earth, and life itself. This inclusion is echoed today by communitarian philosophers such as John Mohawk, who writes: "The people who are living on this planet need to break with the narrow concept of human liberation, and begin to see liberation as something which needs to be extended to the whole of the Natural World. What is needed is the liberation of all the things that support Life — the air, the waters, the trees — all the things which support the sacred web of Life." Leopold changes the role of mankind from conqueror finally to planetary citizen, and demonstrates that history is a product of the land upon which it took place.
He writes of an ecological conscience, in which we are made fully aware of conservation as a "state of harmony between men and land." He decries the current state of land-use ethics, in which we will only take our stewardship of the land as far as our pocketbooks will allow, "governed wholly by economic self-interest." Ethical evolution dictates greater obligation on the part of the land-holder, which, in the most public sense, is each of us.
Leopold convincingly portrays evolutionary versus man-made changes in the land with the metaphor of the land pyramid, based on ecology's biotic pyramid of soil, flora, and fauna, all energized by the sun. Where evolution tends to increase diversity through changes slow and local, man wants to decrease diversity in the land through changes that are ecologically fast, even violent, and increasingly global. This is where man most endangers all life on the planet — through unthinking diminution of life for his own economic convenience.
Leopold relates himself to Tristram, the legendary medieval knight sent by his king to bring Isolde back to be the king's bride. In the process of doing so, Tristram (known as Tristan in Richard Wagner's romantic opera) falls in love with Isolde himself. Leopold is a knight sent out to recapture the beauty of wilderness for civilization, but must die with his love in the end for wilderness is too beautiful for civilization to appreciate, "in short, land is something [the civilized man] has 'outgrown'." Leopold goes about, axe-in-hand, "one of the time-tested few that leave the world, when they are gone, not the same place it was," but a better place.
That this would be one of the last statements written by Leopold is truly remarkable. Here was a man fully cognizant of his role in the world. He had arrived at a point in his philosophy where he could see where civilization needed to go. He is somewhat pessimistic, as the current trend leads further away from a land ethic, not toward it. Yet he looks with eagerness to the brewing revolt that will force us to "quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem." "Examine each question," exhorts The Professor, "in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient."
A Sand County Almanac is significant for Leopold's own admission to guilt in the current state of ecology. For this we should be eternally grateful to the role Albert Hochbaum played in urging his mentor to show us the complete man, the evolution of the ecologist, himself. Leopold was reticent to comply, believing he only needed to state what he now knew to be true, but Hochbaum persevered and we are the wealthier for it. More importantly, Leopold shows that he adhered to his own definition of an ecologist, which he gave to his students in Wildlife Ecology 118: A person is an ecologist if he is skillful in seeing facts, ingenious in formulating hypotheses, and ruthless in discarding them when they don't fit.
If A Sand County Almanac were written solely for ecologists it would be a good book. What makes it a great book is that it was written at a level comprehensible to laymen as well as experts. Leopold understood that if we are to turn away from the path of annihilation of all things wild, we must each be an ecologist well versed in the land ethic. And his timing was perfect: it was written at a time (post-WWII) when Americans were becoming more willing to hear of their mistakes, set aside their new-found role as world conqueror, and take up shovel and axe as citizens in the community of land, ecologists.
A Sand County Almanac presents us with Leopold's final philosophy, a land ethic that includes humans in a community of soils, waters, plants, and animals. It predates Arne Naess' deep ecology by several decades, but it means the same thing. We and the planet are one.
Aldo Leopold is a man whose legacies are so numerous, so broad and far-reaching, so deep, and so consequential for 20th Century America that an entire book could easily be dedicated to describing them. Unfortunately, this is not the place for a book-length treatment of the man's legacies; therefore, it must be brief and to the point.
His legacies can be categorized into tangible and intangible — minor monuments to his life, and major influences that changed the world. To begin with, he raised five children, each of them successful in their own right: three were admitted to the National Academy of Sciences, and another directs the Aldo Leopold Foundation. "The shack," that renovated chicken coop surrounded by restored Wisconsin prairie and forest, is now an educational facility with the mission of promoting "care of natural resources by fostering an ethical relationship between people and land." The Arboretum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, designed and implemented by The Professor, functions today as a research and teaching facility. It boasts numerous restored ecosystems, including the Leopold Pines, a 21-acre stand of mixed hardwoods and pines typical of northern Wisconsin forests. The Arboretum also sponsors the Aldo Leopold Professor of Restoration Ecology.
Any one of these monuments would be enough for most of us to conclude we had lived a full and productive life. These, however, are among Leopold's minor legacies, merely incidental to the real work that he did. His major contributions to advancing civilization are four in number: 1) designated wilderness areas on our National Forests; 2) the field of wilderness ecology; 3) the Ecosystems Management Approach; and 4) the foundation for environmental philosophy and the ecology movement. These legacies are so deep and far-reaching that here we can only skim the surface of their impact on America and the world, now and in the future. I encourage you to read beyond this book in order to discover the true extent of Leopold's legacy. Nevertheless...
As a young forester and advocate of sport hunting after World War I, Leopold was very aware of the preservationist writings of John Muir and his efforts to protect natural wonders in the western U.S. Leopold copied Muir's words into his own notebook, but he was no preservationist. Leopold was too deeply immersed in the utilitarian doctrine of Gifford Pinchot's conservation movement — in which forests were governed by enlightened management, not sanctity — to approach the benefits of wilderness from a preservationist's point of view. He was, however, an avid outdoorsman who could see that all of the wilderness in America would soon be gone if action were not taken soon. The job of preserving wilderness called for somebody inside the Forest Service, with its vast tracts of forest lands, somebody who understood the rationale of wilderness in the context of the Forest Service, and, most importantly, somebody who could convince upper management of its benefits.
Leopold met with Arthur Carhart at the end of 1919 to discuss the notion of designated wilderness. Carhart was another young forester, actually a landscape architect, and the first person in the Forest Service to be called Recreational Engineer. He had been assigned to survey several hundred sites for summer homes at Trappers Lake on the White River National Forest of northwestern Colorado. His conclusion was that no summer homes should be built on such a beautiful alpine lake. In fact the area should somehow be set aside, preserved in its natural state, "in order to return the greatest total value to the people." Both Leopold and Carhart could see how they must appeal to the utilitarian goods of wilderness if they were to succeed in protecting it. Carhart's appeals met with success, and Trappers Lake is now part of the Flat Tops Wilderness Area. Carhart later transferred to the Superior National Forest, where he initiated steps to create the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.
Leopold reported back to his station in New Mexico, seriously moved by the notion of being able to protect forest lands from further development. He published an article in the November 1921 issue of the Journal of Forestry titled "The Wilderness and Its Place in Forest Recreation Policy," the profession's first formal discussion of designated wilderness on forest lands. His purpose was to "give definite form to the issue of wilderness conservation, and to suggest certain policies for meeting it, especially as applied to the Southwest." He went on to question "whether the principle of highest use does not itself demand that representative portions of some forests be preserved as wilderness." "Highest use," he wrote, "demands its preservation." This was masterful application of the Forest Service's own policies, even fundamental utilitarian philosophies, to make the preservationist argument that no use may in fact be the highest use for certain areas. He went on to propose the headwaters of the Gila River on the Gila National Forest of southwestern New Mexico as a prototype. The area was largely inaccessible due to its mountainous terrain, had no agricultural value except for a few grazing permits, and still held its indigenous wildlife intact.
In October of 1922, Leopold submitted a report to his boss, the District Forester. He formalized his proposal that the Gila River headwaters be designated wilderness. His arguments were not merely recreational, a form of land use that would not be legislated for another 50 years, but even cultural. Writing from his own passion for wilderness he argued "against the loss of adventure into the unknown." He used environmental economics, at the time an undiscovered field of study, to declare that designated wilderness "would not subtract even a fraction of one percent from our economic wealth, but would preserve a fraction of what has, since first the flight of years began, been wealth to the human spirit." His superiors in the Forest Service were impressed by the argument. On June 3, 1924, just five days after Leopold took a transfer to the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, the Gila Wilderness Area became the first national forest land to be so designated in America.
Today, the Gila National Wilderness is a very popular site for travelers desiring an outdoor experience in southern New Mexico. It celebrated its 85th anniversary the year this guide was written. The site is accessible to automobile traffic via a road that penetrates its core and ends at the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument.
Just east of the Gila Wilderness lies the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, also set on the Gila National Forest. This smaller wilderness area is much less popular since it has no paved road, but offers the more serious outdoor enthusiast an opportunity to mingle with multitudinous wild animals among the piñon/juniper forests 7000 feet in elevation. Do not expect to sleep at night, with mule deer snorting, coyotes yapping in the canyons below, owls hooting, and even a lone wolf (could it be a Mexican gray?) howling at the moon above your tent. The Continental Divide Trail, a national recreation trail that follows the divide from Mexico to Canada, bisects the wilderness area and offers a unique experience to wilderness hikers. I believe Leopold would have preferred his own wilderness area to the Gila.
For some time, during the 1920s, Leopold had thought about, and even began working on, a textbook he felt could be useful in training those interested in game management in the southwestern United States. He was to call it Southwestern Game Fields, but the book was too narrowly focused and he quickly ran into difficulty conducting the required research from his post in Wisconsin. Besides, one of his most cherished notions — predator control — was running into severe problems on the southwestern deer ranges. The deer were reproducing without check, destroying their own range through overgrazing. He scrapped the book but the idea stayed with him, fermenting until the time was right for a broader conception.
He left the Forest Service in 1928 to conduct a large-scale game survey. After nearly three years of intense study on game populations in a half dozen states, Leopold's Report on a Game Survey of the North Central States was published in 1931. The survey confirmed that intense agricultural practices were eliminating food and cover required by game. As habitat disappeared so did the game: quail, prairie chicken, grouse, snipe, woodcock, even rabbits and squirrels. The report was a breakthrough for the conservation movement as it now confirmed what many had long suspected, and led directly to the American Game Policy of 1930.
It also led directly to a book titled Game Management. With knowledge gained from the game survey, Leopold finally had the data he needed to complete a textbook on the subject closest to his heart. The Great Depression had begun with the October 1929 crash of the stock market, but the Leopold family did not fully feel its affects until 1932. Undaunted, Leopold used his state of unemployment to write what would soon become the premier textbook of the new field of game management.
In his "Foreword" to the 1986 edition, Laurence R. Jahn places the book in the context of conservation, ecology, and environmental writing in the United States. The book came out of a time when Americans were witnessing decimation of wildlife populations, including several to the point of extinction, most notably that of the passenger pigeon. Jahn asserts that "Game Management provides the ideas, principles, techniques, and administrative alignments to encourage land to produce wildlife." But Game Management did something more. Game Management introduced philosophy to the care of wildlife and their habitats.
That the book deals with philosophy as much as it does principle and technique is made clear at the top of Leopold's "Preface," in which he asks "what is the good life?" This is precisely the question put forth by Aristotle in his "Exhortation to Philosophy" some 2300 years earlier. Leopold updates the question for his own times thusly:
We of the industrial age boast of our control over nature. Plant or animal, star or atom, wind or river — there is no force in earth or sky which we will not shortly harness to build "the good life" for ourselves.
But what is the good life? Is all this glut of power to be used for only bread-and-butter ends? Man cannot live by bread, or Fords, alone. Are we too poor in purse or spirit to apply some of it to keep the land pleasant to see, and good to live in?
He decries the pollution haunting American streams and rivers and mourns the attendant loss of grouse, duck, and antelope while our domesticated herds prosper under the care of science. He asserts that [t]he central thesis of game management is this: game can be restored by the creative use of the same tools which have heretofore destoyed it — axe, plow, cow, fire, and gun. He ascribes to the book a three-fold function:
First, to serve as a text for those practicing game management or studying it as a profession.
Second, to interpret for the thinking sportsman or nature-lover the significance of some of the things he sees while afield with gun or glass, or does in his capacity as a voting conservationist.
Third, to explain to the naturalist, biologist, agricultural expert, and forester how his own science relates to game management, and how his practices condition its application to the land.
In short, this is an attempt to describe the art of cropping land for game and to point the way toward its integration with other ends in land-use.
Only through the writings of a philosopher could such a book succeed in its own mandates. Leopold summarized the first chapter by foreshadowing one of his later and most important philosophical statements: Every head of wild life still alive in this country is already artificialized, in that its existence is conditioned by economic forces. Game management merely proposes that their impact shall not remain wholly fortuitous. The hope of the future lies not in curbing the influence of human occupancy — it is already too late for that — but in creating a better understanding of the extent of that influence and a new ethic for its governance.
Game Management quickly became the most widely used textbook in its field. It shortly began to supplement its author's income at a time when much of the nation was suffering greatly from the economic woes of the Depression. The book continued to support the Leopold family long after Aldo died, as Estella renewed the copyright in 1961. It is still in print, now published by the University of Wisconsin Press — a very, very long print run for a college textbook.
More importantly though, Game Management "provided fundamental concepts, philosophies, principles, and insights" for the next generation of conservationists, ecologists, game managers, and policymakers, according to Jahn. Game Management was the seed for much of the environmental policy that was implemented in the middle of the 20th Century. The book is credited with serving as a foundation for legislation such as the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act of 1934 and, especially, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969. This latter legislation, according to Jahn, "incorporates an ecological dimension in public administration, building from the ground up, with more careful attention given soils, waters, plants, animals, and people in particular units of the landscape. NEPA brought the environmental impact statement as an action-forcing mechanism to induce an ecological conscience throughout the U.S. federal government's operations." It led to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973, "the first to encompass a truly comprehensive federal wildlife conservation effort, with particular emphasis on habitat protection." Jahn lists Game Management, NEPA, and ESA as "significant milestones in the evolution of America's conservation history." Since the implementation of NEPA and ESA, numerous other laws have been enacted based on Leopold's philosophies and principles of integrated resource management.
The policy application of Leopold's wilderness ecology is today known as the Ecosystem Management Approach. Read nearly any modern textbook on the Ecosystem Management Approach and you will find some reference, dedication, or other attribution to Aldo Leopold. In 1996, the late Mollie Beattie, Director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, wrote in an essay titled "Biodiversity Policy and Ecosystem Management:"
Aldo Leopold first conceived the concept of an ecosystem approach a half century ago. In his earlier writings, [...] the evolution of Leopold's thinking can be traced from being fully in favor of predator control and vermin elimination (as well as maximum production of those species that humans find entertaining) to recognition that we cannot manage for any one piece of the system and expect to save the rest. His final work, A Sand County Almanac, embodies a resounding testament to an ecosystem approach. Wildlife managers are finally catching up to him fifty years later.
There are numerous definitions of ecosystem management, but each shares a commitment to promoting stability and diversity in the land, including its soil, waters, plants, and animals. Ecosystems may be viewed as offering a wide array of goods and services. Goods include food, construction materials, medicinal plants, and recreation. Services include the maintenance of hydrologic cycles, regulation of climates, maintenance of the gaseous content of the atmosphere, and the storage and cycling of essential nutrients, along with many other processes without which life would not exist as we know it. The Ecological Society of America, an organization in which Leopold was elected president in 1947, argues that we must manage ecosystems not with "focus on the 'deliverables' but rather on sustainability of ecosystem structures and processes necessary to deliver goods and services."
By 1940, Leopold was beginning to reflect even more deeply on what today we would call environmental issues. He was a permanent member of the University of Wisconsin wildlife management faculty, had published hundreds of articles on various aspects of conservation and ecology, and continued to organize and serve with numerous organizations dedicated to preserving wilderness and wildlife. Now he turned to philosophy.
He wrote a piece called "Biotic Land Use," in which he discussed the health of land, defining it in terms of stability and diversity. Remember, this is the end of the Depression, with the Dust Bowl still a bitter memory, just as the world is preparing to go to war again. America had seen the results of instability in its land and was quickly losing much of its biotic diversity. But Leopold used a broad stroke when he talked about land. By "land," he meant the "soils, water systems, and wild and tame plants and animals" that indwell the land, what today we would call an ecosystem. He began to discuss ethics with his ecology students, questioning "the soundness of the assumptions on which the whole modern structure is built" as America prepared itself for war. At this time he wrote "Cheat Takes Over," a vituperative exposé of the invasion of useless weeds due to the overgrazing of fragile grasslands in the Pacific northwest. He decries the helpless attitude of local ranchers, saying, "There is, as yet, no sense of pride in the husbandry of wild plants and animals, no sense of shame in the proprietorship of a sick landscape. We tilt windmills in behalf of conservation in convention halls and editorial offices, but on the back forty we disclaim even owning a lance." Leopold had found his voice.
He made contact with a publisher friendly to his ideas: Harold Strauss, an editor at Knopf. Strauss had initially approached Leopold with a book idea on wildlife observation, but Leopold was way beyond that. He had in mind "a series of ecological essays, illustrated, as a Christmas book." Strauss was highly enthusiastic, and Leopold began writing essays in earnest.
By the end of his life, Leopold had written a number of essays sufficient for his idea, but still needed a concluding statement. The result was "The Land Ethic," a piece of philosophy that gained its author immortality. Here he discusses an "ecological conscience" and summarized the thoughts of a lifetime at the forefront of environmental thinking with his most quoted statement:
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.
And on that statement hangs the course of environmental philosophy and the ecology movement of the '60s and '70s.
It is just the sort of seed from which movements are germinated. Short enough to be memorized by adherents. Broad enough to be applied to any situation. It became his final statement.
Aldo Leopold planted the seeds for the environmental movement with his words. First with Game Management, in which he defined the scientific basis for wildlife ecology and management, then with the "small cogs and wheels" that he made so real for us in the essays of Round River. Finally, he gave us words to live by in "The Land Ethic," his final essay in A Sand County Almanac.
Leopold kept us informed of his growth through his writing. The pen is Leopold's axe, the written word is his land. His words became seed. His signature, indelibly set in policy.
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.
— ALDO LEOPOLD
See the timeline of events in the lives of Abbey, Carson, and Leopold.
I trust you have enjoyed this tour through the writings of Abbey, Carson, and Leopold as much as I have enjoyed acting as your guide. In this last chapter I hope to convince you of the merit in my argument that Abbey, Carson, and Leopold are without doubt the most influential environmental writers of the 20th Century. Together they constitute the environmental movement's arborvitae, the bark, the sapwood, and the heartwood of that philosophical tree of life that informs us as we enter the 21st century. Their words influenced environmental policy to an extent unmatched by any others, though they sprouted numerous fruit-bearing branches.
Take a good look at the matrix of events that surrounded the lives of Abbey, Carson, and Leopold. You will see that they were influenced by their time and place at least as much as they influenced the future. They were each self-aware actors intent upon modifying the environment while simultaneously living fully within it. They perceived the instant karma of Manifest Destiny, and worked to correct its course. Indeed, each was fully conscious of making history, that is to say, re-writing the future as they depicted the present.
Like any movement, the 20th Century environmental movement is based on the myths — stories, histories, and legends — that compel its followers to enact its ideals. Abbey, Carson, and Leopold are the triune godhead of that movement. Edward Abbey's fictionalized reporting on the environmental deeds taking place in his beloved desert inspired environmental actions across the nation and around the globe. He echoed Walt Whitman's famous exhortation to "Resist much, obey little," as in this address recorded by Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First!:
Speaking toward the future, Abbey offered this advice: "Oppose. Oppose the destruction of our homeland by these alien forces from Houston, Tokyo, Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and the Pentagon. And if opposition is not enough, we must resist. And if resistance is not enough, then subvert."
Abbey supplied the environmental movement with the deeds it needed to take back the wilderness and keep it like it was!
Rachel Carson's words became the law of the land, the literal gospel of environmentalism in America. In the wake of her writing came pesticide regulations that forever changed the way chemicals would be perceived and used. A large and powerful agency of the federal government, the Environmental Protection Agency, would be created for the purpose of enforcing these new laws.
And at the core of it all, Aldo Leopold's thoughts formed the basis of the ecology movement of the latter half of the century. That Homo sapiens should consider and adopt an ethic, a code of right relationships, toward the soil, water, plants, and animals that make up the planet Earth was heretofore unheard of. That we should honor metavalues such as integrity, aesthetic quality, and stability, the very truth, beauty, and goodness of a planetary community was nothing less than environmental revelation. Leopold's Escudilla becomes our Mount Sinai, his thoughts at once simple and profound, concrete on the surface yet abstract to the extent we are able to follow.
"A culture can be no stronger than its strongest myths," as we recall the words of James P. Carse. Abbey, Carson, and Leopold gave us myths strong enough to compel and sustain a culture of ecological awareness that changed the direction of the world. In doing so, our mythmakers became mythic heroes themselves. Indeed, it has become difficult to distinguish the apostle from the apocrypha, the writer from the writings.
We identify so strongly with these authors because they wrote directly to each of us in words we could understand at our own level of comprehension. Where we lacked the vocabulary necessary to understand them, they patiently taught us the words we would need to know. Abbey, Carson, and Leopold knew full well that influencing the next step in evolution would require more than a reasonable argument —they would have to reach us through the vividness of a universal statement at once penetrating and simple in application. We are entranced by the unfailing charm of their prose.
All of which has led to a veritable, and verifiable, paradigm shift in environmental awareness. This can be quantified by innumerable references to their work in the current literature. It seems nearly every book that has anything to do with the environment references Aldo Leopold, while many, many books will also refer to Rachel Carson or Edward Abbey, depending upon the focus of the book, scientific or philosophical. This paradigm shift is best qualified by the blossoming of intellectual movements that have founded themselves on the work of Abbey, Carson, and Leopold.
Possibly the most erudite of these movements is the relational, total-field perspective of environmental philosopher Arne Naess' deep ecology. Bill Devall and George Sessions, teachers of sociology and philosophy, elaborated on Naess' thesis, stating that "Deep ecology goes beyond a limited piecemeal shallow approach to environmental problems and attempts to articulate a comprehensive religious and philosophical worldview." They speak of self-realization and biocentric equality within this paradigm. They list eight basic principles of deep ecology, sound statements in which we may adhere as members of the church of metaphysical ecology. Unfortunately their principles strike our jaded ears as commandments that limit our freedom of action, quite unlike the liberating maxims of Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, and Aldo Leopold.
Academe responded enthusiastically to the seats left vacant by Abbey, Carson, and Leopold, creating an entirely new field of study in environmental philosophy per se. Academicians quickly realized they had an extant literature, resurrecting Thoreau and Whitman from the anthologies of 19th Century American literary works, while rescuing John Muir from the confines of the Sierra Club. Annie L. Booth describes environmental philosophy and its offspring, environmental ethics, as "an exploration of the cosmos and humanity's relationship to it." Of course, that is what all of philosophy aspires to, but environmental philosophy informs us from an ecological foundation built on Thoreau, Whitman, and Muir, encouraged by Abbey, Carson, and Leopold. One professor of environmental philosophy, Joseph R. des Jardins, has beautifully stated the philosophical choice we make every day:
Humans cannot help but be shaped and created by their social history. But this can occur in two ways. Humans can go through life being created by and in turn creating their social world without fully recognizing this reality, or they can be fully conscious of and responsible for this history.
Abbey, Carson, and Leopold were thus fully conscious, and demand of us a careful reading of their work. As Thoreau admonished, "Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written."
Who, then, will be the most influential environmental writers of the next century, the 21st Century? Chances are they are not yet living among us, but they will most assuredly be informed by Abbey, Carson, and Leopold. The unimaginable paradigm shift they will provoke will lead their readers, their critics, and their followers into realms of thought into which we can barely glimpse — we do not even possess the vocabulary at this time to speak of their visions. They will succeed because of their careful attention to defining that vocabulary for us. They will succeed because of their tremendous ability to write, to paint pictures of their visions in words.
Even so, we must begin preparing for the writings of the next generation even as they prepare to write them. The key to implementing a land ethic is ecological literacy, the ability to think and communicate in ecological terms. When we have attained the requisite level of ecological awareness, a land ethic will follow.
I hope This Land has played a worthy role in that process for you.
