I HAVE READ MANY DEFINITIONS OF WHAT IS A CONSERVATIONIST, AND WRITTEN NOT A FEW MYSELF, BUT I SUSPECT THAT THE BEST ONE IS WRITTEN NOT WITH A PEN, BUT WITH AN AXE. IT IS A MATTER OF WHAT A MAN THINKS ABOUT WHILE CHOPPING, OR WHILE DECIDING WHAT TO CHOP. A CONSERVATIONIST IS ONE WHO IS HUMBLY AWARE THAT WITH EACH STROKE HE IS WRITING HIS SIGNATURE ON THE FACE OF HIS LAND. — ALDO LEOPOLD
Environmental law and policy of the 20th Century grew out of the environmental literature that preceded it. Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and John Muir prepared the soil with works that transcended common nature writing to study mankind within the environment. They provoked serious consideration of the environment per se, and John Muir's efforts resulted in policy visible on the ground: Yosemite National Park is but one example. Environmental law and policy in the 20th Century came to reflect ideas found in the best of environmental literature, which took on mythic importance to our culture.
Myths are stories we tell ourselves over and over to explain origins, destinies, and our present situation; therefore, myths are critical to the development of a civilization. As James P. Carse notes, "A culture can be no stronger than its strongest myths." Modern myths must satisfy an increasingly well educated society, and we now demand that myths be based on accurate scientific and historical evidence. The 20th Century environmental movement is based on just such myths — fundamental, if relative, truths, really — and its most prominent mythmakers are Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, and Aldo Leopold.
These three authors generated a paradigm shift in environmental awareness. A paradigm is more than just a shared set of theories or model; a paradigm is the shared commitment to a model. To sway the belief system of scholars from one model to another requires profoundly convincing arguments made at the fundamental level of discussion. Abbey, Carson, and Leopold waged such arguments. They altered our understanding of the environment from one that was anthropocentric, detached, and irresponsible to one biocentric, inclusive, and increasingly reactive to our own actions.
Though they were most active on the environmental stage during the middle half of the 20th Century, roughly 1925 to 1975, these three authors did not work in concert with one another. Abbey, the youngest of the three, was highly influenced by Leopold's land ethic and was undoubtedly aware of Carson's Silent Spring. Carson was not favorably disposed to Leopold's conservationist perspective, and died several years before Abbey published Desert Solitaire. Leopold, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, may have been aware of Carson's "Undersea" works, but could not possibly have known when he died that Abbey was then attending a land grant university many miles to the south.
Their differences are numerous, though their similarities may be more telling. Of their differences, most obviously, two were men and one was a woman. Abbey and Leopold both married and fathered five children each, though Abbey had five wives to Leopold's one. Carson never married but did raise two nieces after the death of her sister.
Of their similarities, several are remarkable: All three were born in that region of America now known as the Old West, those northern states between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River Valley. All three died at a relatively young age. All three completed Master's degrees at a time when graduate work was rare for anybody, but especially rare for a woman. All three worked for federal government agencies for a good portion of their lives, and all three taught at the university level at some point. Most importantly, all three were disturbed by the environmental trends they perceived and felt compelled to compose their thoughts and seek publication. All three wrote prodigiously.
The tremendous volume of published works that Abbey, Carson, and Leopold left behind makes it at once difficult and enjoyable to study their thoughts. This blog will guide you through some of their most important contributions to environmental literature, while providing enough contextual material to place them within modern American culture. The stage is set with a chapter on "Manifest Destiny"; then each author is introduced with a biographical sketch. Each of the books from which readings were synopsized is critiqued, and the legacy of each author established. Lastly, the total impact of Abbey, Carson, and Leopold on the environment, the environmental movement, and environmental philosophy and literature is presented, including a matrix of events that occurred during their lifetimes.
Readings from two books by each author are summarized: a book of early writings and a later book that represents the summit of that author's philosophy. This was done to demonstrate the evolution and maturation of each author's writing. Several of the books are collections of essays, from which it is relatively easy to select representative samples. Others are longer works that were more difficult to cull: one is a novel, the other an exceptionally tight book-length argument. The purpose of these synopses is to inspire the reader to pursue further the works of these authors. If these summaries feel less than satisfactory to you, by all means read the books, which are available through the Required Reading slideshow in the right-hand frame. Other sources used in compiling this guide are also available for purchase by clicking on their respective titles at the end of each section in which they were used.
From Edward Abbey's extensive bibliography were selected essays from Desert Solitaire, the 1968 book that slowly gained a tremendous following, and his 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, which propelled Abbey into the literary mainstream. Included also are two essays first published in Abbey's 1988 collection, One Life at a Time, Please. "Eco-Defense" and "A Writer's Credo" are essential to a collection that emphasizes the importance of writing to changes in environmental law and policy.
Rachel Carson may have been somewhat less prolific than Abbey, but that does not make the editor's job any easier. Synopses of chapters from Under the Sea Wind show clearly the unique workings of her incredibly literary scientific mind, even if the book was not her best selling. Obviously, no collection of Carson's work would be complete without selections from Silent Spring, but here the task was even more daunting: how to pick a few selections without losing the thread of her argument. Again, the purpose is only to inspire a more thorough reading.
Finally, Aldo Leopold's essays were difficult only in deciding what to chop. He actually only published one book during his lifetime (Game Management, a college textbook), but had published numerous magazine and journal articles on wildlife conservation and ecology. Many of these articles were published again posthumously, largely due to the efforts of his son, Luna Leopold. Essays from Round River, published in 1953 but made up of early articles and entries from Leopold's hunting journal were selected as well as essays from A Sand County Almanac, Leopold's most famous work, published the year after his death in 1948.
You may have noticed by now that the authors are not presented in chronological order. There are several reasons for this: First, as it happens, their alphabetical order is reverse chronological order. By arranging the authors in reverse chronological order the reader can proceed from destinies to origins, immediately grasping the results of earlier thinking. Within each author, however, the selections are arranged in chronological order to show that author's growth over his or her lifetime. This structuring is not without precedent: Aldo Leopold relies on a similar construct in "Good Oak," one of his most important pieces. If these three authors represent the trunk of the tree of environmental philosophy then Abbey is the bark, the visible skin of the tree, where matter meets mind and meaning. Carson is the sapwood, where information flows between science and philosophy. Leopold is the heartwood, the older, colorful core of 20th Century environmental philosophy and literature.
Second, Edward Abbey's self-awareness as a writer makes for an excellent starting point in a book about environmental writing. Think of the writer as one who realizes the impact of writing about the environment on the environment itself. Abbey is a writer's writer who happens to occasionally write about the environment in which he lives.
Finally, Leopold's greatest statement, contained in "The Land Ethic," was saved for last. All of the other works philosophically lead up to this statement, even if most of them were written subsequently.
Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, and Aldo Leopold are the most influential environmental writers of the 20th Century. Their books have been read by millions but more importantly those millions were stirred to action by what they read. Actions became policies that changed the environment — literally. These authors did not work in a vacuum, however. They were greatly influenced by earlier writers such as Thoreau, Whitman, and Muir, but they were also products of their own time and place — 20th Century America.
Aldo Leopold was born in 1887, atop the Flint Hills of Burlington, Iowa, overlooking the Mississippi River. Rachel Carson was born twenty years later in Springdale, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Edward Abbey was born yet another twenty years later in Home, Pennsylvania. Though their births covered forty years, each grew up with frontier stories of the Old West, so recently settled. They were profoundly impressed with the closing of the frontier in America, and would seek out their own frontiers where they could: Abbey and Leopold in the wilderness of the southwestern desert; Carson in the sea. Each was markedly influenced by the times in which they lived. They read the land, they sensed the timbre of their times, and each foresaw the potential for environmental disaster. Abbey, Carson, and Leopold collectively rose to inform contemporary environmental philosophy, while they left their personal signatures indelibly etched upon this land.
ONE OF THE PENALTIES OF AN ECOLOGICAL EDUCATION IS THAT ONE LIVES ALONE IN A WORLD OF WOUNDS.
— ALDO LEOPOLD
The landscape of 19th Century America, the landscape that produced Abbey, Carson, and Leopold, was markedly different from the environment in which readers of this blog find themselves. Just think for a moment how different your own life would have been at the turn of the 20th Century... No cars, airliners, or computers — you might have seen or read about a demonstration of electric lighting somewhere. You would most likely live in an urban setting, regardless of future misconceptions about a mostly rural America, and you are surrounded by filth and disease. Yet, you know there is more to America than meets your eye. Your ancestors and predecessors of the 19th Century found an entire continent just waiting for their plows and their ideals. Vast tracts of unspoiled wilderness still lay just to the west, and that knowledge buoyed their optimism. Even if they never saw those lands, their children would, and they would thrive because America had land enough for their descendants "to the thousandth and thousandth generation." Thomas Jefferson told them so.
The sheer size of the continental nation staggered the 19th Century imagination. Travelers and explorers reported mile after mile of hardwood forests to the west of the Appalachian Mountains. Beyond the forests lay unbroken miles of tallgrass plains just waiting for the touch of your plow. Further west lay mountains and deserts, terrible yet enchanting with possibilities: gold, silver, cattle, land — freedom. Finally, a veritable paradise lay at the shores of the Pacific Ocean: the temperate rainforests of the Oregon Territory; the Gold Hills of California. Many reports were written specifically to lure people to the frontier and contained a great deal of misinformation. Some were just plain lies. The growing economy rested on a foundation of continual frontier settlement. Land speculators, railroads, and even the government needed inhabitants in order to validate their existence in the wilderness.
Not that settlers needed much information before deciding to pick up and move west. They tended to migrate in waves. First came the hunter/trapper types — itinerant men, some with families, who might pause long enough to graze a cow and raise some corn and squash. They lived primarily by their rifles and traps, leaving the land largely undiminished when they heard the first report of neighbors. Next came the hunter/farmer — the first true settler — an industrious sort who cleared the land of timber to build a glassed-in farmhouse with stone chimney and raise cows and hogs and grains and vegetables to feed his family. He stayed long enough to see the value of his land — gotten by fiat of a paternal government — rise tremendously, at which point he moved west again. Finally there came the settled farmers and townspeople — doctors, lawyers, merchants, preachers, et al. This third wave came to stay, improved the lands with intensive agricultural methods, built their towns, and brought civilization to country so recently wilderness.
It took a special kind of person to brave this wilderness: independent of mind and spirit, self-reliant, and above all, optimistic. They tended to sort themselves out into three classes: a better sort, the middling sort, and a meaner sort. They were descendants of various northern European stocks — German, Scotch, Irish, Dutch, Scandinavian, and even a few French, in addition to the English majority — achieving unity in the knowledge that this land was not the Europe from which they had escaped, but America. Without hesitation they set about the task of civilizing the wilderness. They worked hard at it. Some may have been manic-depressive, a disorder possibly quite useful to the farmer, rancher, or logger who must work like hell while the sun shines, then sit and wait for a break in the weather, brutally hot or brutally cold, before he can venture out to work like hell again. As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his history-making book, The Frontier in American History, "these men were emotional. [...] They had faith in themselves and their destiny."
They worked hard and they built a nation. They built it on a foundation of free lands and democratic principles. Turner wrote that "free lands promoted individualism, economic equality, freedom to rise, democracy. [...] In a word, then, free lands meant free opportunities."
Oh, yes. There were others living on this land — whole peoples who did not share in the nation building effort. Native Americans were pushed along, resettled in reservations to the Southwest, or exterminated. Recently freed slaves tended to huddle in cities east of the Mississippi, though a few found good work on the immense ranches of the West. Chinese laborers were imported to lay railroad tracks and work the mines but were not allowed to own land. Even women, the wives of frontiersmen, had no voice. Each of these groups would have to wait for democracy to reach down to them.
Manifest Destiny was a white man's notion, encouraged and enforced by a white man's government. From the times of the Revolutionary War, the United States (at that time a plural noun) had promoted policies designed to gain new territories. George Washington, the son of a settler himself, settled the lands he surveyed. Thomas Jefferson was the son of a pioneer, born in the frontier region of Virginia. Abraham Lincoln, of course, was the very embodiment of pioneer democracy.
In their quest for additional lands, the United States commissioned expeditions such as Lewis and Clark's, which conducted scientific inquiry as it opened new lands to American fur traders of the early 19th Century. The United States fought wars with England, France, Mexico, and the Indians. More importantly, they won. They made deals, and every time they made a deal or won a war, new territory brought them that much closer to the reality of a continental nation. Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory for a song at a time when Napoleonic France needed the money for its own dreams of empire. Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California were easily won from a weak Mexican government once the United States set their collective mind to the goal. In all, 29 states were admitted to the Union during the 19th Century. The United States doubled and redoubled themselves until they formed a singular concept, spanning the continent from sea to shining sea.
All of this land needed people, and fast. The newly aggrandized federal government met this need with ordinances and acts that encouraged migration and settlement to the west. The Land Ordinance of 1785 contributed a lasting legacy of land divided into townships consisting of 36 sections of 640 acres (one square mile) each. They were to be auctioned off for as little as one dollar per acre. The Homestead Act of 1862 granted 160 acres of Western land, mostly desert, free to any qualified applicant.
Migrants needed transportation to reach their homesteads, so the states and federal government responded with waterways such as the Erie Canal, connecting the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, and roads such as the Cumberland Road, supporting traffic to and from the Old West of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. The Santa Fe Trail to the Southwest and the Oregon Trail to the Northwest were soon carrying goods and settlers to the loneliest points on the map. Then along came the steam-powered Iron Horse — the railroad. In the same year that Congress passed the Homestead Act it also passed the Pacific Railroad Act, thus financing a transcontinental railroad. In May of 1869, a westbound Union Pacific train met an eastbound Central Pacific train near Ogden, Utah. Pounding of the Golden Spike was telegraphed back east, announcing that travelers could now cross the nation in days rather than weeks or months.
This was important because gold, silver and other precious ores had recently been discovered out west. California had its Gold Rush of 1849, with peak production of four million ounces of gold in 1852. Nevada's Comstock Lode of silver ore was discovered in 1859, and Colorado attracted miners and their retinue to numerous gold and silver rushes throughout the latter half of the century. Again, the government stepped in to assist. After a great deal of discussion beginning in 1850, delayed mostly by demands that Chinese miners be prevented from harvesting precious metals, Congress passed the Mining Act of 1866, declaring that "mineral lands are free and open to exploration and occupation." The Mining Act, with some revisions, is the law of the land to this day.
Mining for precious metals was not the only subterranean activity, however. Coal production increased 3000 per cent to 14 million tons between 1820 and 1860, then grew to 270 million tons by the turn of the century. Even with this incredible increase in coal production, Turner could write in 1910 that "[m]ore coal was mined in the United States in the ten years after 1897 than in all the life of the nation before that time." Mining companies came to be hated giants of industrial greed, subjecting employees to the harshest, most dangerous working conditions while raping the land as they followed veins of bituminous and anthracite ore.
The landscape was also changing on the grazing lands of the West. Where buffalo had so recently roamed, cattle now grazed. Even land that could not support buffalo was turned to pasture. Ranching was pursued wherever the land would not yield crops or gold. Of course, these deserts and semi-desert shrublands could not support many head per acre, so ranches tended to become large as homesteaders quickly discovered they could not survive on 160 acres, selling their land for just enough to move further west.
In spite of this headlong rush for free lands granted to homesteaders, miners, and railroads, the American population was actually becoming more and more urbanized. Historian Dayton Duncan notes that while the American population grew 16-fold during the 19th Century, its urban population increased 139-fold. In fact for every homestead granted, 20 farmers moved into the city. American cities grew first on the Atlantic coast, followed canals, rivers, and turnpikes to the Mississippi Valley, then took root along the railroad tracks that soon ran capillary-like to nearly anywhere on the continent.
This new urbanization of America, the third wave of settlers, believed in Manifest Destiny to an extent unconsidered by the first wave of simple hunters or the second wave of migrant farmers. The civilized settlers of towns and cities across America read with fervor the words of Herman Melville in 1850:
God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. The rest of the nations must soon be in our rear. We are the pioneers of the world; the advance guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours. In our youth is our strength; in our inexperience, our wisdom.
America had, in less than 100 years, risen to fulfill its Manifest Destiny. Lands that were once merely overrun with Indians were now inhabited by democratic pursuers of an increasingly industrial economy. These zealots had created a fiercely democratic society based on the availability of free lands that could be exploited for agriculture, minerals, or transport, the essential ingredients of commerce. But even before Destiny was achieved, there were those who could see potential problems on the American landscape.
A literary genre evolved in which prescient writers could warn of the dangers to America's rush to exploit her lands. Henry David Thoreau wrote of his experience on Walden Pond, an experiment in resistance to the industrial revolution with its debtor society and indifference to Nature. "Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature," he wrote in Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Thoreau railed against that noisy new technology that each day broke into his Solitude, saying of the railroad, "few are riding, but the rest are run over." He recommended living thriftily within one's means such that "to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime." In a statement completely contradictory to Manifest Destiny he concluded, "Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth."
Thoreau was just two years the senior of Walt Whitman, an American poet who greatly influenced the environmental movement of the 20th Century. Whitman decried the tyranny latent in Manifest Destiny, exhorting us to "resist much, obey little," as in "To the States:"
To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States,
Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth,
ever afterward resumes its liberty.
Whitman also sensed trouble ahead for disciples of the Industrial Age, as in this excerpt from "To a Locomotive in Winter:"
Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily following,
Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering;
Type of the modern — emblem of motion and power — and pulse of the
continent,
For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here
I see thee,
With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow,
By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes,
By night thy silent signal lamps to swing.
Clearly, not all of America's authors were as optimistically assured of the rightness of Manifest Destiny as was Melville. This was the time of America's literary fruition. Literary notables to emerge from 19th Century America included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mark Twain, and Henry James. While they wrote of pioneer days, they did so with nostalgia for days gone by before we even had a chance to enjoy them.
Much of their subject matter deals with the loss of frontier in America, and its replacement by the commercial class of third wave settlers. This closing of the frontier was academically established by a young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893. Turner had noticed a statement by the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 that "Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line." Over the course of a spectacular career (for a historian), Turner turned that statement into a thesis of American history through first an essay, then popular speeches, then a book, The Frontier in American History. While today's historians debate the validity of Turner's thesis, at the turn of the century it was taken as gospel. The American frontier was forever gone, lost in the achievement of Manifest Destiny. While vast areas of desolate frontier lands (those with fewer than seven inhabitants per square mile) remained, what was lost was the promise of free lands to "the thousandth and thousandth generation" of Americans. The frontier was a social process or, as Turner termed it, "the meeting point between savagery and civilization" that could never again be used as a generator of American democracy.
Turner noted four revolutionary changes in the last decade of the 19th Century: 1) The supply of free land was no longer a factor in American development. 2) Capital had so concentrated in the hands of a few fundamental industries, e.g., coal, cattle, and railroads, that a significantly new and different economy had arisen. 3) The United States had recently embarked upon unprecedented imperial missions overseas. And 4) economic disparity between the rich and the poor had resulted in unparalleled political divisiveness on the question of Socialism. This schism would result in the rise of the Populist party at the turn of the century, and a long period of Democratic Party White Houses in the 20th Century.
Turner's thesis was greeted enthusiastically both within academe and without. Theodore Roosevelt converted to Turner's view of America — so did Woodrow Wilson. All of America, in fact, came to believe that Manifest Destiny had been achieved and America would now benefit from industrialism without the distraction of having to tame the wilderness. When Turner retired from his teaching duties at Harvard in the summer of 1924, he settled down in Madison, Wisconsin, to write. As it happened, his neighbor two doors down was none other than Aldo Leopold, recently returned from the frontier lands of New Mexico, who corroborated many of Turner's theories with what he had himself seen of disappearing wilderness.
While Turner's thesis was at heart an optimistic one, it also revealed the downside of "progress." Environmental problems became more pronounced and more widely known at the turn of the century, such that Turner was forced to admit in 1910 that "[t]hree years ago the President of the United States summoned the governors of forty-six states to deliberate upon the danger of the exhaustion of the natural resources of the nation." Wisconsin would soon, in fact, be nearly completely deforested — the state's pine forests were gone by the turn of the century; the hardwoods would follow within the next 25 years. America's bird life was suffering mightily at the hands of civilization: The heath hen was hunted to extinction by 1932. Migratory waterfowl populations had dipped to precariously low numbers while Aldo Leopold was still a young boy growing up along the Mississippi flyway. The passenger pigeon had already succumbed to America's taste for squab. Leopold would later reflect on a monument to the pigeon in A Sand County Almanac, saying:
Our grandfathers were less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by which they bettered their lot are also those which deprived us of pigeons. Perhaps we now grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts, that we have gained by the exchange. The gadgets of industry bring us more comforts than the pigeons did, but do they add as much to the glory of the spring?
And again, the federal government responded to the needs of America. Gifford Pinchot, a forester subscribing to new theories of scientific forest management, had recently become chief of the Department of Agriculture's Division of Forestry. He was a close friend and advisor to Theodore Roosevelt when the original Rough Rider became President in 1900. Together they began the U.S. conservation movement. In 1905, Roosevelt signed the Transfer Act that handed responsibility for the nation's forest lands to the new U.S. Forest Service, with Gifford Pinchot as its chief. The lands held as Forest Reserves more than doubled to 150 million acres between 1903 and 1907, at which time they were officially designated National Forests. The utilitarian conservation of America's National Forests would ensure "a perpetual supply of timber for home industries, preventing destruction of the forest cover which regulates the flow of streams, and protecting local industries from unfair competition in the use of forest and range," as proclaimed in the Forest Service's first mission statement.
Working the same ground but from a vitally different perspective was the preservationist movement led by John Muir. In 1867, the 29-year-old Scottish-American naturalist walked 1000 miles from his Wisconsin home to the Gulf of Mexico. He then turned toward the Pacific, visited Yosemite Valley, and embarked upon a life-long mission to preserve and protect what little remained of America's pristine natural wonders. His efforts resulted in formation of the Sierra Club, and eventually succeeded in gaining Yosemite's designation as America's second National Park (after Yellowstone) in 1890.
The philosophies of John Muir and Gifford Pinchot would soon meet head-on in the Hetch Hetchy Valley of Yosemite National Park. The City of San Francisco wanted to dam the Hetch Hetchy for a municipal water supply. John Muir, the preservationist, said we may as well "dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man." To which Pinchot, the conservationist, replied that whatever injury may accompany the substitution of a lake for the swampy floor of the Hetch Hetchy Valley "is altogether unimportant compared with the benefits to be derived from its use as a reservoir." San Francisco got its dammed water in 1913. The "greatest good for the greatest number" has held sway in nearly every court battle since.
In response to the emerging crisis in wildlife resources, Theodore Roosevelt asked Congress to designate certain lands as federal game refuges. One Congressman denounced the President's proposal as "the fad of game preservation run stark raving mad." The bill died, prompting the President to ask, "Is there any law that will prevent me from declaring Pelican Island a Federal Bird Reservation?" He was informed the island was already federal property, so he said, "Very well, I so declare it." In this way, Pelican Island, off the Florida coast, became the nation's first wildlife refuge in 1903.
Meanwhile, technological advances were occurring regularly as the 20th Century dawned on America. The closing of the frontier had been achieved in large part due to the immediate implementation of recent technological advances. The windmill, barbed wire, railroads, Morse Code and the telegraph, the McCormick Reaper, the Colt revolver, and a network of irrigation systems to water the arid lands west of the Mississippi River had all played vital roles in the winning of the West. Now the inventions of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were introduced: electric lighting and the telephone. In 1903, the Wright Brothers made their first flight in a powered aircraft. That same year, Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company, using assembly-line manufacturing techniques to build tens of thousands of new Model T automobiles each year.
The U.S. population, which had not topped 10 million by 1820, would swell to well over 100 million before 1920. Where the population had been less than 10 per cent foreign born at the beginning of the 19th Century, by the end of that century some metropolitan areas in the east were only 30 per cent native stock. Such rapid changes in technology, manufacturing, and demographics forced lurking social issues to the fore. Workers' revolts were common, and were ruthlessly quelled by captains of industry with the aid of their allies in government. The Woman Suffrage movement was gaining momentum under the leadership of such women as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It is difficult for us to imagine a nation in which women had no vote. Their cause was delayed by other issues such as the temperance movement, which harbored many of the same advocates, and Negro emancipation after the Civil War. Nonetheless, women's suffrage would not be granted across the nation until well into the 20th Century. Rachel Carson was 13 years old when the 19th Amendment, extending voting rights to women, was ratified in 1920.
American society became increasingly stratified through the winnowing effects of commerce and industry at the turn of the century. Increasingly, special interest groups — conservationists, feminists, and socialists alike —turned to the federal government to right the wrongs of the nation where previously they would have turned to the states or to themselves.
This sense of belonging to a greater entity — the United States was now definitely a singular noun — combined with the news of horrors coming out of Europe, led the U.S. to reluctantly shed its isolationist ideology and become involved in World War I. As part of the effort, the Forest Service supplied the lumber for barracks, trenches, and aircraft, requiring a pronounced increase in timbering activity and a scaling-back of recreational development on national forest lands.
After Armistice Day, Americans breathed a collective sigh of relief and returned to the task of improving their lives at any cost. While the economy boomed, ethics went bust. Warren G. Harding's Presidency was among the most corrupt, and several members of his Cabinet were forced to resign amid scandal. Americans were largely inattentive because times were good. The typical citizen could now afford to buy an automobile. The atypical citizen was beginning to travel by air. Charles Lindbergh successfully flew the first solo crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in an airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, in 1927. The times were heady, if dry, as emerging technologies reached down to the masses. Unfortunately, these seemingly good times were brought to a screeching halt with the Stock Market Crash of October 29, 1929, precipitating the Great Depression.
The Depression did not immediately affect everyone in America. It rolled out from Wall Street over the next several years, hitting different sectors of the economy at different times. In general, however, the nation went from an unemployment rate of less than two per cent in the middle of the '20s to nine per cent in 1930 and nearly 24 per cent in 1932. That year also saw industrial production slowed to 40 per cent of its capacity, and the stock market at ten per cent of its pre-Crash level. To make matters worse, intensive agricultural practices in the West reaped a grim harvest as dry, windy conditions settled into the southern Plains from 1933 to 1935, resulting in the Dust Bowl that drove myriad farmers and settlers off the plains and further west.
The nation turned once again to the federal government for help. Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President in 1932, the beginning of 16 years of New Deal policies generally credited with bringing about the nation's slow economic recovery.
In Europe the Great War never really ended, merely took recess in order to regroup. Hitler rose to power. By 1939, Europe was again fighting and Japan was waging war in Asia and the Pacific, but America tried desperately to remain neutral. This ended on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the first time American territory had been attacked in the 20th Century. Germany declared war on the U.S. shortly thereafter and America was soon committed to military theaters around the globe.
The War Years greatly affected American life. More than 16 million Americans served in the armed forces — 292,000 died in battle. Beyond this a tremendous effort was undertaken to produce the machinery of war, which had lain dormant since 1919. Gasoline and other materials were rationed. Women were recruited in unheard of numbers to work in factories that had never before seen a female employee. The nation's efforts resulted in unconditional surrender from Hitler's Germany after unrelenting aerial bombing reduced German manufacturing capabilities to zero. The Japanese were largely defeated after the firebombing of Tokyo had reduced that wooden city to ashes, but the U.S. sent a clear and unequivocal message to the rest of the world (most especially the Soviet Union) with atomic bomb blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945.
America again turned inward after the war, turning assembly lines that had so recently produced tanks and bombers to the task of producing cars and airliners. Communism became the great external threat, so the nation endured communist witch hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and embarked upon a series of military conflicts involving the Soviet Union in Southeast Asia. The federal government, which had grown tremendously in the first half of the 20th Century, continued to expand its influence, its budget and its workforce. Where federal government expenditures at the turn of the century amounted to no more than $400 million annually, by 1960 that number would reach $90 billion, with federal employees numbering nearly nine million.
This was also a time in which people were beginning to realize the environmental wrongs of the first half of the century. Manifest Destiny was not achieved without great cost to the environment. The population had doubled again, reaching 200 million before 1970, as metropolitan areas sprawled across the continent, connected by the new Interstate system of high-speed highways. Wilderness became dear. The bald eagle, our national symbol of pride, was on the verge of extinction due to hunting and degradation of habitat. Lake Erie was pronounced dead, and the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire due to pollutants pouring into the stream from industrial plants. Finally, an Apollo spacecraft took a photograph of the Earth as it returned from the Moon. Never before had we seen ourselves from space. Never before had we felt so small, so fragile.
All of which led to the ecology movement of the late '60s and early '70s. President Richard M. Nixon declared the Environmental Decade, and the first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970. Millions of Americans came to believe something was wrong with the environment, and it was up to them to fix it.
This change in attitude was the result of several factors that defined the first half of the 20th Century: the closing of the frontier, the rise of technology in everyday life, and the works of several great writers. They were not without their detractors. As Alexis de Tocqueville had noted 100 years earlier, "Nothing is more annoying in the ordinary intercourse of life than this irritable patriotism of the Americans. A foreigner will gladly agree to praise much in their country, but he would like to be allowed to criticize something, and that he is absolutely refused." The environmental wrongs decried by Abbey, Carson, and Leopold cast them as foreigners in their own land, a land where material conveniences came to outweigh environmental rights, even democratic principles.
Rather than be defeated by the problems they saw, Abbey, Carson, and Leopold rose to expand the horizons of science and philosophy, creating new fields of environmental study where none had previously existed. Frederick Jackson Turner predicted these advancements in 1914 when he wrote:
But if there is disillusion and shock and apprehension as we come to realize these changes, to strong men and women there is challenge and inspiration in them too. In place of old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science, fruitful for the needs of the race; there are frontiers of better social domains yet unexplored.
Abbey, Carson, and Leopold were the children of pioneers, raised in the Old West of turn-of-the-century America. They listened to the stories of their parents' pioneering struggles. They read the works of Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and John Muir. They believed in the spirit of America, and wanted only to set their country back on the right track of environmental awareness and stewardship. As Turner wrote, "In spite of his rude, gross nature, this early Western man was an idealist withal. He dreamed dreams and beheld visions. He had faith in man, hope for democracy, belief in America's destiny, unbounded confidence in his ability to make his dreams come true." It may well be that no American writer fits this description better than does Edward Abbey, to whom we now turn.
Flames licked lightly the body of America's foremost expert on conservation, wildlife management, ecology, and wilderness.
Aldo Leopold died of a heart attack on April 21, 1948, near the renovated chicken coop and reclaimed Wisconsin farmland known to his family and friends as "the shack." He had been fighting a neighbor's trash fire gone out of control. It threatened the tens of thousands of pines and hardwoods he and his family had planted. He set down the water pump he had carried to fight the fire, and lay down to rest his head on a clump of grass.
The morning of his death, Leopold counted a flight of 871 geese flying into the nearby Wisconsin River of Sauk County. The geese were attracted by the cover and food provided by the Wisconsin woods Leopold had worked so hard to restore. Just the day before, he, with his wife Estella and his youngest daughter, Estella Jr., added 100 more pines to the stand of some thirty thousand trees and shrubs planted over 11 years at the shack.
At 61 years old, Aldo Leopold was the elder statesman of the American conservation movement. Two months earlier, he'd been appointed to the United Nations Economic and Social Council's International Scientific Conference on the Conservation and Utilization of Resources.
In February of 1948, he had begun teaching Wildlife Ecology 118 at the University of Wisconsin in Madison for the fifteenth year. The class had a record 97 students. "The Professor" began the course by saying, "To formulate hypotheses about wildlife, and to test them for conformity to observed facts, is wildlife ecology. 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." Aldo Leopold was an ecologist.
One month earlier he had attended, as Commissioner, a meeting of the Wisconsin Conservation Commission and voted to defeat a move to approve hydroelectric dams on the Menominee, Chippewa, and Wisconsin Rivers. He stated for the record, "The building of a power dam is an act of violence on nature and it is up to somebody to prove a dam will make the river more valuable than it is without it."
The previous year, he was elected honorary vice president of the American Forestry Association, and president of the Ecological Society of America.
He offered a new graduate-level course in Fall of 1946, called Advanced Game Management 179 "to develop the student's ability to think critically." This, after he had worked unsuccessfully all summer to convince the Conservation Commission to allow another any-deer hunting season to reduce the herd, saying "I want my exact words in the record. The same public which now insists that we postpone our [deer] reduction program will ask us, after the starvation is over, why we did not foresee it."
In April of 1945, the Leopold family planted 935 pines and tamaracks at the shack. They were heartened to find that natural reproduction had increased the plantings of aspens, birches, cherries, red osier dogwoods, willows, and other shrubs planted over the previous ten years. Leopold remarked, "The trees are getting awkward to measure."
Earlier in the year, he stood up as Conservation Commissioner to the public outcry for reenacting the predator bounty saying "I shall fight for again discontinuing the bounty whenever extermination again threatens. We have no right to exterminate any species of wildlife. I stand on this as a fundamental principle."
November 25, 1944 was opening day of the deer season in Wisconsin but, though he and his family were at the shack, Leopold did not hunt that year for the first time in many years. The previous spring and summer had been spent calling for a second any-deer hunt in order to further reduce the herd to Wisconsin's estimated carrying capacity of 200,000 deer. The Wisconsin Conservation Congress, a representative body of hunters from around the state, voted for a buck-only season and the State Conservation Department concurred. The Conservation Commission, on which Leopold served, would not vote against the wishes of both the hunters and the State's game professionals, no matter how pursuasive the arguments of Professor Leopold.
Spring planting that year included 475 tamarack, 500 red pines, and 1000 white pines. Leopold heard a loon at the shack for the first time.
The previous deer season had come to be known as the "crime of '43." An antlerless season had resulted in 128,000 deer taken — three times more than any previous year. The kill was unevenly distributed, however, so some areas were hardly touched, especially the northern counties deep in snow, while other counties reduced the herd by as much as 90 percent, when a reduction of 50 percent would have sufficed to improve the herd. Leopold, himself, suffered a tremendous loss when one of his favorite hunting dogs was injured by a wounded deer. Gus had to be put down by the hunter, who would never hunt deer again.
He had been appointed to the Wisconsin Conservation Commission on June 17, 1943, just in time to promulgate a new policy designed to alleviate the intense overbrowsing of woodlands that Wisconsin suffered due to its vastly excessive deer herd. As a member of the Citizen's Deer Committee, he had made several recommendations to the Conservation Commission the previous May. He suggested the Commission authorize an antlerless season in the fall, with a complete closure on buck hunting in order to improve the sex ratio of the herd, and concentrate hunting on overbrowsed refuges. Further, he recommended, the Commission should lift the bounty on wolves, and curtail the artificial feeding of deer.
In April, the Leopold family planted 2000 more pines at the shack. They also saw the first natural pine reproduction on the property, probably the result of a fire the previous year.
Earlier that spring the Citizen's Deer Committee inspected deer ranges in northern Wisconsin, where they found record numbers of starving deer, including one hundred fawns. There were apparently no predators of any kind to cull the herd, and there was obvious evidence of severe overbrowsing in the deer range. Leopold had been appointed chairman of the Committee in September of 1942 to conduct an independent evaluation of the deer situation in Wisconsin, especially in the north where deer were threatening to overpopulate their range.
April of 1942 saw four members of the Leopold family, Aldo and Estella, their youngest son Carl, and Estella Jr., plant 1700 pines, junipers, and cedars at the shack.
As chairman of the American Wildlife Institute's Technical Committee, Leopold toured Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, California, and Oregon in July of 1941. There he saw firsthand the deterioration of deer range throughout the West caused by policies intended to build up the deer herd, including elimination of predators such as mountain lions and coyotes.
Spring planting at the shack that year included 1700 white, jack, and red pines, along with numerous pasque flowers, Dutchman's breeches, and blue phlox.
In March of 1941, Leopold, his mind heavy with news of Hitler's campaign of domination in Europe, diverted with a lecture on War Ecology to his Wildlife Ecology 118 class. He explained the give and take of man's place in the environment, saying, "Nations fight over who shall take charge of increasing the take and to whom the better life shall accrue. Even in peace-time the energies of mankind are directed not toward creating the better life, but toward dividing the materials supposedly necessary for it."
Leopold began to record the number of geese sighted at the shack in April of 1940, and recorded as well the planting of 1500 more pines.
Half of the previous spring's planting of 2300 pines were lost to drought, in spite of Leopold's new desodding procedure around each tree. A handful of bur oak acorns were planted the previous fall to mark a visit to the shack by Charles Elton, an early ecologist whom Leopold admired greatly, and his wife.
That summer, Leopold had been employed by the Huron Mountain Club as a wildlife consultant. He recommended a management plan that included holding the interior of the Club's 15,000-acre tract of virgin hardwood forest near Lake Superior free from logging, so to be preserved as a natural area. He recommended the interior be surrounded by selective logging that would ease deer pressure from without, disperse the deer population within the tract, and encourage songbirds and wildflowers. He also recommended that the Club cease the killing of predators, especially wolves, and allow scientific studies on the land.
As Chairman of the Technical Committee of the American Wildlife Institute, Leopold helped to establish a waterfowl research station, known as the Delta Duck Station, on Lake Manitoba, near Winnipeg, in June of 1938. He installed one of his students, Albert Hochbaum, to work on it. Here, Hochbaum would conduct the research that led to his own stature as preeminent scientist and ecologist. His findings, compiled in the classic Canvasback on a Prairie Marsh, would win him the Brewster Medal of the American Ornithologists' Union and the 1944 Literary Award of the Wildlife Society.
The previous April saw the planting of 100 aspens, hazels, dogwoods, and sumacs, 100 white pines, 500 red pines, 500 jack pines, 500 red oaks, 50 tamaracks, 50 red cedars, 12 wahoo bushes, 40 red osier dogwoods, 30 more hazels, 24 paper birch, and 12 hard maples. This time the family added extra mulch and potash fertilizer to encourage the young plants.
Leopold admitted Albert Hochbaum to the Department of Wildlife Management graduate program in the fall of 1937. Hochbaum had been working with the National Park Service, but intended to pursue his interest in hole-nesting birds. He came to the program equipped with the talent to pursue his goal, a keen mind, and skill in nature drawing.
The previous year's planting of over three thousand cedars, junipers, crabapples, witch-hazel, raspberries, mountain ash, red pine, white pine, and jack pine, suffered great losses to drought and dust storms, leading the family to plant another three thousand pines in the fall.
In the spring of 1936, the Leopold family, that is, Aldo and sons Starker and Luna, had determined to create "a little forest for ourselves" at the shack. The whole family, including Estella, Nina, Carl, and Estella Jr., undertook to plant 2000 pine trees and dozens of mountain ash, juneberry, nannyberry, cranberry, raspberry, and plum. Only a few of the trees survived the nation's raging Dust Bowl that year.
In January of 1935, the Leopold family bought an abandoned farm on the Wisconsin River in Sauk County, along with eighty acres of surrounding land that would be augmented by another 40 acres in later years. The farm included a chicken coop, which the family transformed into a vacation cabin. Leopold started a new journal that day, a journal in which he would record field observations on the property.
He accepted an invitation in October of 1934 to help organize a new "Wilderness Society" through which he was able to promote on-the-ground efforts to preserve American wilderness. The organization was radical, small, and tight-knit.
On June 17, 1934, Leopold and a group of Madison civic leaders and University officials broke ground on the University of Wisconsin Arboretum and Wild Life Refuge. "Our idea," he said, "is to reconstruct [...] a sample of original Wisconsin."
The University of Wisconsin offered a course called Game Management 118 for the first time in March of 1934. The instructor was Aldo Leopold.
Leopold served on the President's Committee on Wild Life Restoration for the Roosevelt Administration beginning in January 1934. The Committee was authorized to develop a national wildlife conservation plan for purchasing submarginal agricultural lands. It included popular cartoonist Jay "Ding" Darling, soon to be head of the Biological Survey.
In October of 1933, Leopold created a wildlife management plan for 500 acres at the University of Wisconsin. This, just after the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation had appointed him to a new chair of conservation with the title Professor of Game Management. The position required teaching a course on game management and overseeing the University's proposed Arboretum. His new five-year contract paid $8000 a year, and brought to an end the hardest times of the Depression for the Leopold family.
For two years, Leopold had been using letterhead that proclaimed him a "Consulting Forester," but there was not much consulting work to be had during the financial depths of 1932-1933. The Leopold family had just been through several months in which they received no income whatsoever.
Leopold attended the Matamek Conference in Quebec in July 1931, an international conference of biologists to discuss cyclic phenomena in nature. He first met Charles Elton there, a Professor of Zoology at Oxford University and author of Animal Ecology, a book that led the way in the modern approach to ecology.
That same summer, Leopold organized and consulted with a group of farmers, calling themselves the Riley Game Cooperative, near Riley, Wisconsin, to implement provisions of the American Game Policy on private lands, including restocking and winter feeding of game. The Cooperative soon became one of Leopold's preferred hunting grounds.
Formulation of the American Game Policy had culminated in December of 1930. Leopold chaired the committee that drafted the final policy, in which the American Game Protective Association called for a national commitment to game management. This was meant to include provisions for regulating take, providing cover and food, and controlling predators. It fundamentally placed responsibility for carrying out these provisions in the hands of landholders, especially the nation's farmers.
Leopold left the United States Forest Service on June 26, 1928, at age 41, to conduct a game survey of north-central states for the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute (SAAMI). In the course of his research, he identified two trends: an increase in human population, including hunters, and a decrease in the ability of land to produce game.
Estella Jr., fifth child and second daughter of Aldo and Estella Leopold, was born in 1927.
The family took up archery and bowhunting in 1926, making their own bows out of stocks of osage orange, yew, Port Orford cedar, and Sitka spruce — access to specialty woods being a perquisite enjoyed by the Assistant Director of the USFS Forest Products Laboratory. He had been appointed to the position on July 1, 1924, which required moving the family to Madison from their home in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
In the month prior, the Gila Wilderness Area on the Apache National Forest of New Mexico was established. It was the first designated wilderness area in the National Forest System. Wilderness was now rare in the Southwest, and Aldo Leopold had been instrumental in planting the seed of desire for designated wilderness areas.
Aldo "Carl" Leopold, fourth child and third son, was born December 18, 1919.
The senior Leopold met with Arthur Carhart that same month to discuss the radical notion of designating forest lands as "wilderness." This was just months after he had rejoined the USFS as Assistant District Forester in Charge of Operations to conduct inspections of National Forests in District 3, report findings, and recommend changes. He had left the Forest Service to work briefly as Secretary for the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce, where he developed and honed his public relations and organizational skills.
Adelina "Nina" Leopold was born in August of 1917.
Leopold visited the Grand Canyon for the first time in May of 1917, and was disappointed by the "improvements" installed on the rim in order to attract tourists. He had been sent there by the Forest Service to work on a recreational development plan with Frank A. Waugh. Waugh was a leading landscape specialist, dead set against turning the Canyon over to the National Park Service, with its impossibly paradoxical mission to "conserve the scenery [...] and to provide for the enjoyment of the same." Waugh failed.
Leopold spent the fall of 1916 working on the Grand Canyon Working Plan to correct discord between the natural beauty that draws tourists to the Canyon and the impact those same tourists have on the Canyon once they get there.
He was also working with the New Mexico Game Protective Association to enforce newly promulgated hunting laws, establish game refuges on the national forests of New Mexico, and wage war on predatory animals. Leopold had been instrumental in organizing sportsmen (hunters) into Game Protection Associations of Arizona and New Mexico with the goal of increasing game in the southwest.
Luna Bergere Leopold, second son, was born on September 8, 1915.
Leopold was detailed to the USFS Office of Grazing for nine months, where he learned to appreciate "carrying capacity" as applied to stock on forest lands. The Leopold family had moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico in October of 1914 for the new detail.
Aldo Starker Leopold, Aldo and Estella's first child, was born October 22, 1913. The couple had been married on October 9, 1912, at the Cathedral of Saint Francis in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
During the spring of 1912, Leopold planned and built the supervisor's quarters on the Carson National Forest at Tres Piedras, New Mexico. He built the small but elegant house around a great fireplace, facing the Sangre de Cristos mountains to the east, for $650. The new home was necessary because Leopold had fallen in love with Estella Bergere, the daughter of a prominent Santa Fe family that could trace its roots back to captains of Cortez and Coronado. The State of New Mexico was admitted to the Union in January of that year, largely due to the efforts of Estella's uncle, Solomon Luna.
Leopold was promoted to Supervisor of the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico in May of 1911. He had previously been assigned as Crew Chief of a reconnaissance party to survey the Blue Range on Apache National Forest in Arizona and New Mexico. This assignment was a disaster for the young forester: He made crucial mathematical errors to the baseline survey, which threw the rest of the survey off, and made enemies of everyone on his crew. In spite of this, his superiors in the Forest Service felt he showed a good deal of promise.
He climbed Escudilla Mountain upon arrival in Springerville, Arizona, in July of 1909, having reported to work for the US Forest Service on the 3rd of that month. He had just completed 10 weeks of Forest Service training in New Orleans, after graduating from Yale University with a Master of Forestry degree. The Class of '09 included 35 foresters dedicated to the ideas and ideals of Gifford Pinchot, benefactor to the Yale Forest School, father of utilitarian forest management, and first Chief of the United States Forest Service.
Before Yale, Leopold attended the Lawrenceville School for two years of college preparation, having attended public schools in Burlington, Iowa until that time. He was known among his schoolmates and the community as a local expert in matters of ornithology, having developed his interest in birds and natural history while growing up in a mansion overlooking the Mississippi River, atop Prospect Hill in Burlington.
He was born Rand Aldo Leopold on January 11, 1887 to Carl Leopold and Clara Starker Leopold, first cousins and descendants of displaced aristocracy cum frontier nobility. From his father, young Aldo learned the ways of Nature, including a deep respect for life that was exhibited in Carl's self-imposed bag limits and hunting rules to encourage the local populations of waterfowl at a time when the migrating flocks were obviously declining. He also took from his father the drive to do things right: Carl ran the family business — the Leopold Desk Company — with the motto, Built on Honor to Endure. From his mother, he learned to love literature, philosophy, and poetry, especially that of Henry David Thoreau and Jack London.
At age eleven, Leopold wrote in his composition book that he liked to study birds in general, and wrens the best of all, "because they do more good than almost any other bird." He began keeping an ornithological journal in 1902, a habit he would retain for life.
When Aldo left for Lawrenceville, his mother's first letter, sent while his train was still steaming eastbound, pleaded with her son to give "his last thought at night to his mother." His father implored him to "write us fully, my boy, as often as you can every detail of your life in school as it will be of interest to us." And he did.
At the Lawrenceville School, he wrote home every day, often describing his tramps through nearby woods and his latest nature sightings. As an adolescent his phrase was often flowery but prophetic, once writing: "We can put on paper that such-and-such flowers are added to the list, that these birds have arrived and those are nesting, but who can write the great things, the deep changes, the wonderful nameless things, which are the real object of study of any kind."
As a young Assistant Director on the Carson National Forest, in June of 1911, Leopold started a newsletter called The Pine Cone "to scatter seeds of knowledge, encouragement, and enthusiasm among the members and create interest in the work. May these seeds fall on fertile soil and each and every one of them germinate, grow, and flourish...." Leopold served as chief editor, reporter, and illustrator.
While working to organize sportsmen in Arizona and New Mexico, he published another paper called The Pine Cone for that audience. This second newsletter was meant "to promote the protection and enjoyment of wild things. As the cone scatters the seeds of the pine and fir tree, so may it scatter the seeds of wisdom and understanding among men, to the end that every citizen may learn to hold the lives of harmless wild creatures as a public trust for human good." Early issues called for "the reduction of predatory animals ... the wolves, lions, coyotes, bob-cats, foxes, skunks, and other varmints," and hailed the killing of an infamous grizzly bear, saying, "the king of Mt. Taylor was a cow-killer from away back. He was a bad egg. He ate a thousand dollars' worth of beef a year. The destructiveness of cow-killers is intolerable, and it is highly desirable that they be destroyed on sight."
During this time he began keeping a hunting journal. His first entry recorded the day's take of three doves on the Rio Grande flats, along with some self-criticism. "Shot poorly," he wrote.
He began publishing articles in journals and periodicals in 1918, including an article in Outers Book — Recreation called "The Popular Wilderness Fallacy." In another article called "Forestry and Game Conservation," Leopold first compared game management to forest management, saying, "Forestry may prescribe for a certain area either a mixed stand or a pure one. But game management should always prescribe a mixed stand — that is, the perpetuation of every indigenous species. Variety in game is quite as valuable as quantity." Though aware of the need for biodiversity, his awareness at this point did not yet include a need for predators, even in wilderness.
He addressed a group of University of Mexico students in October of 1920. In speaking to them on "A Man's Leisure Time," Leopold declared that he spent his own leisure "entirely in search of adventure, without regard to prudence, profit, self-improvement, learning, or any other serious thing." He applauded others who spent their leisure time working to educate themselves in natural history and recommended such pursuits to his audience.
Another article in a 1921 edition of the Journal of Forestry titled "The Wilderness and Its Place in Forest Recreation Policy" was the profession's first treatment of wilderness. The seasoned forester wanted "to give definite form to the issue of wilderness conservation, and to suggest certain policies for meeting it, especially as applied to the Southwest." Furthermore the article asked "whether the principle of highest use does not itself demand that representative portions of some forests be preserved as wilderness." It recommended setting aside the headwaters of the Gila River in the Mogollon Mountains of New Mexico as a prototype wilderness area.
From 1924 to 1928, Leopold worked on a book he wanted to write called Southwestern Game Fields, but never completed for several reasons. He was experiencing difficulty communicating with his primary contributors in the field, when at the same time they began reporting of a disaster on the Kaibab National Forest. The forest had been swept clean of predators and the deer were now overbrowsing the range to the point of their own starvation. This new data required Leopold to completely rethink his stance on predator control. During this period, he also wrote numerous articles on game management, technical forestry, and wilderness.
He spent the better part of 1930 writing Report on a Game Survey of the North Central States, based on the SAAMI Game Survey, and immediately formulated plans to write an accompanying book. This now-classic textbook on game management would be more encompassing than Southwestern Game Fields, using the latest in field research, and based on a series of lectures Leopold had presented at the University of Wisconsin.
He devoted the first six months of 1931 to writing Game Management, while the nation and the Leopold family languished in the grasp of the Great Depression. Charles Scribner's Sons agreed to publish Game Management if Leopold would agree to certain reductions in production costs and contribute $500 of his own money. Leopold agreed, and signed a contract with Scribner's on January 11, 1932 — Leopold's 45th birthday. He worked diligently on Game Management throughout 1932, and sent the final manuscript to Scribner's on July 16, 1933.
In October of 1933, Leopold wrote "The Conservation Ethic" for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Here Leopold showed the direction in which he was heading after writing Game Management, saying the goal of conservation "is a universal symbiosis with land, economic and esthetic, public and private."
Critical acclaim and material reward soon began to accrue from the publication of Game Management, By November of 1933, 1900 copies had been sold and the book soon became a required text for students of wildlife conservation in America. That same month, Leopold received his first royalty check of $675 — not a bad sum for Depression times.
In 1935, Leopold first used the phrase "land ethic" in an address called "Land Pathology" given at the University of Wisconsin. While the country choked on the product of its own abuse of the land during the Dust Bowl, Leopold said, "Philosophers have long since claimed that society is an organism, but with few exceptions they have failed to understand that the organism includes the land which is its medium[.]" Further, forces required to stabilize the land could "eventually yield a land ethic more potent than the [forces themselves], but the breeding of ethics is as yet beyond our powers."
Leopold published "Marshland Elegy" in the October issue of American Forests to celebrate the sandhill crane and lament its loss in Wisconsin's marshlands. He later delivered "Natural History, the Forgotten Science" at the University of Missouri, in which he criticized the natural history curriculum. He also wrote more than thirty popular articles for the Wisconsin Agriculturalist and Farmer in order to provide the farmer with basic information needed to practice wildlife conservation on the farm. It was at this time that Leopold first used the word "ecology," and delivered an address on "A Biotic View of Land" to a joint meeting of the Society of American Foresters and the Ecological Society of America, in which he discussed the relationship between ecology and conservation.
By the end of 1941, Leopold was seriously considering writing an illustrated series of ecological essays. He discussed the idea with Harold Strauss, an editor at Knopf, but his busy schedule kept getting in the way. He began writing in earnest in late 1943, beginning with one of his personal favorites, "Great Possessions" in September, followed by "Illinois Bus Ride" on New Year's Day, 1944, and "The Delta Colorado" several days later. He wrote "Thinking Like a Mountain" on April 1, 1944 in response to Albert Hochbaum's proddings to admit his own guilty role in the extermination of predators in the Southwest. Leopold and Hochbaum had discussed the idea of Hochbaum illustrating Leopold's essays, but constraints on Hochbaum's time prevented collaborating with the former student while he researched and wrote Canvasback on a Prairie Marsh.
Leopold delivered an address to the Conservation Committee of the Garden Club of America in June 1947 on "The Ecological Conscience," "an affair of the mind as well as the heart. It implies a capacity to study and learn, as well as to emote about the problems of conservation."
He wrote "The Land Ethic" in the summer of 1947 to summarize his ecological essays. His capstone piece was created largely by combining and rewriting "The Conservation Ethic," "A Biotic View of Land," and "The Ecological Conscience" from earlier publications and addresses.
Leopold met with Charles Schwartz to discuss illustration of the book in the summer of 1947. Schwartz was an illustrator then working with the Missouri Conservation Commission who had been introduced to Leopold by his son, Luna.
He sent a manuscript to Knopf in September 1947, but editor Clinton Simpson promptly rejected the book, saying "What we like best is the nature observations, and the more objective narratives and essays. We like less the subjective parts — that is, the philosophical reflections[.] In short, the book seems unlikely to win approval from readers or to be a successful publication as it now stands."
Disappointed but undaunted, Leopold wrote "Axe-in-Hand" in November of 1947, and a new, more concise, foreword in December. Meanwhile, his, son, Luna, felt Leopold was not given fair treatment by Knopf and began negotiations with Oxford University Press and William Sloane Associates of New York.
Leopold wrote "Good Oak" in early 1948, and on the same day that he voted against hydroelectric dams in Wisconsin, he wrote to Carl Russell, superintendent of Yosemite National Park, to oppose construction of a highway through Tioga Pass, saying, "I think the Park Service has already acquiesced in far too much motorization, and that the time to call a halt on that process is now, while there are still some wilderness values left to conserve."
He continued to edit the manuscript and, on Wednesday, April 14, 1948, Phillip Vaudrin, editor at Oxford, called Leopold to say Oxford would like to publish the book. Leopold wired Charlie Schwartz with the good news on Thursday, April 15, then wrote to Luna to thank him for his efforts in getting the book published.
On Wednesday, April 21, Leopold recorded sighting 871 geese at the shack, the most geese he had ever recorded in all of his journals.
About 10:30 that morning, smoke was spotted on a neighbor's farm...
In the autumn of 1922, the Leopold brothers, Carl and Aldo, set out upon an expedition to hunt and explore the Colorado River delta south of the Mexican border. Both men made journal entries (Carl's are identified by "C.S.L.") with detailed accounts of successful hunting and prodigious knowledge of the local fish, fowl, and game.
WARNING: Sensitive readers may be offended by the carnage.
Read "The Delta Colorado" in Round River by Aldo Leopold
Leopold waxes polemic in his call for an ethic based on environmental awareness. In the process, he foresees the development of speciesism, green marketing, and environmental economics as dead ends along the road to a true environmental philosophy.
Read "Conservation" in Round River by Aldo Leopold
In compiling this set of his father's essays, Luna Leopold, a geologist, chose to title the collection after one of the included pieces, "Round River." In it, his father had used the legend of Paul Bunyan floating logs down the "restless waters" of Wisconsin's Round River, a river that flowed into itself, to describe the round river of biotic lifecycles. The younger Leopold uses the metaphor to portray the lifecycles of his father's career as conservationist, ecologist, and writer through essays written and re-worked over the greater part of his career.
Aldo Leopold envisioned the hierarchical food chain as a biotic stream running through a system of leaky pipes. "A rock decays and forms soil. In the soil grows an oak, which bears an acorn, which feeds a squirrel, which feeds an Indian, who ultimately lays him down to his last sleep in the great tomb of man — to grow another oak." But the squirrel misses some of the acorns, which may either germinate and become another oak or decompose and return directly to the soil. The Indian, too, cannot eat all of the squirrels, allowing some of them to return to dust without their energy flowing through the top of the food chain. There exist an infinite number of these biotic pipes, all interconnected such that "each animal and each plant is the 'intersection' of many pipe lines; the whole system is cross-connected."
Philosophy too is a matrix of ideas and systems of thought that feed one another in the Round River that "grows ever wider, deeper, and longer." Philosophers continually see farther and farther, standing on the shoulders of their predecessors, but not every philosophic trend is immediately involved in the energy flow of a succeeding trend. Many ideas are set to paper, only to decompose and increase the fertility of the soil from which they came.
And so it is with one's own personal system of philosophy.
The beauty of Round River lies in the insight we get into Aldo Leopold's personal growth: from a forester fresh out of college and steeped in the Gifford Pinchot school of conservation "for the purpose of preserving a perpetual supply of timber," to an environmental philosopher calling for an ethical and aesthetic premise for the condition of land. And we gain these insights only because Leopold constantly wrote and published his ever-growing thoughts.
Round River was published five years after Leopold's death. It followed A Sand County Almanac but includes material written before those later essays. Each piece had a separate and different genesis. Some, such as "A Man's Leisure Time" and "Natural History — The Forgotten Science," were first conceived as university lectures, while others, such as "The Delta Colorado," were taken from Leopold's exhaustive hunting journals.
Luna Leopold was criticized by reviewers, non-hunting conservationists — even his mother and Rachel Carson — for emphasizing his father's passion for hunting. But without this look at Leopold's earlier writings we would never have gained insight into the metamorphosis that gave us A Sand County Almanac.
In "A Man's Leisure Time" we get an early example of Leopold waxing philosophical before an audience at the University of New Mexico. He questions and remarks upon the human condition in this lighthearted comment on the meaning of meaning. "What is a hobby anyway?" the young forester asks, noting that hobbyists do not so much choose their hobbies as they are chosen by them. This calling by some unconventional pursuit was most familiar to Leopold, who had been overwhelmingly taken by various interests since he was a young boy. He points out the eccentric pursuits of numerous like-minded acquaintances who turned out to be world renowned for their expertise in fields like paleontology, botany, and falconry. And they did it right in their own backyards with no guidance other than the compass of their own genius.
"A good hobby must also be a gamble"; else how could it stimulate the mind of its disciple? Without the possibility of failure — transplanting a favorite rose that may not survive or losing a hawk long in training — one might as well be working on an assembly line for all the mental stimulation one would receive.
"The Delta Colorado" chronicles an adventure in one of Leopold's favorite hobbies. It is taken from his hunting journals, and reads like the diaries of Lewis and Clark. The daily log from 21 days in October and November of 1922 reveals as much about the writers (Leopold's younger brother, Carl, contributed several entries) as it does of the country just south of the Mexican border where the Colorado River empties into the Gulf of California. As the brothers make their way from Yuma, Arizona, they listen to the advice of their elders — men with names like Priest, Freeman, Fly, and Will Lowe — who warn of great waves dashing their little canoe to pieces, but who also gain the pair access to Mexican authorities and assistance. The brothers pass themselves off as "harmless hunters" but soon shed the guise as they embark upon a killing spree of shocking proportions.
The journal entries are generally quite precise in the number and types of game killed and captured by the brothers. They occasionally lapse into vague pluralities such as a "mess" when their hunting skills surpass their desire to keep score, but for the most part we are left with an amazingly detailed set of statistics. The body count goes like this (animals wounded by traps or poor shots are counted among the dead):
Species
Number killed or caught
Mallards
4
Widgeons
5
Quail
66 + a mess
Sheepshead
1 + several
Mullet
3 + many
Buzzards
2
Avocets
3
Willets
1
Coyotes
2
Geese
10
Green-wing ducks
3
Doves
7
Catfish
Many
Bobcats
2
Cormorant
1
Coots
2
Duckhawks
1
Mexican black hawk
1
Raccoons
3
Pelicans
1
In just three weeks, the pair trapped, shot, or caught seven carnivorous mammals, 25 waterfowl, nearly 100 birds, and numerous fish — edible and inedible alike. Like Lewis and Clark they identified their quarry and often examined crops, entrails, and scat to determine the animal's diet. They wrote up their findings with the zeal and precision of the best of scientists, and, like good conservationists of their day, they worked hard to improve the game stock by removing as many predators as humanly possible. But the most important aspect is the attention to detail in their journal entries. Without them, we would understand neither hunter nor Leopold as well as we do. Without "The Delta Colorado," we could not fully appreciate Leopold when he wrote, ten years later, "Hunting and nature study are merely the beginning and the end of a cycle normal to advancing age in each individual." Without "The Delta Colorado," we could not fully understand our selves.
In "Natural History — The Forgotten Science," Leopold revisits his theme from "A Man's Leisure Time." He tells of common folk who undertake natural history as a combination of sport and science, and are themselves better people for it. As he always did so well, Leopold writes specifically to the audience at hand, a group at the University of Missouri. He dismisses the Biology curriculum of the day by asking if a typical Phi Beta Kappa student could describe the natural history and environmental factors on a local Missouri farm. He emphasizes the importance of taking action in environmental matters, hailing the efforts of two unknown Wisconsin farmers who spend a day planting tamarack when those trees will never amount to one red cent for either of them. Finally, Leopold introduces his audience to the inner workings, the cogs and wheels of the ecological mechanism, the very stuff of which natural history is made.
In "Conservation," Leopold relates the now-maturing field to "a state of harmony between men and land." He also gives us his definition of land: all of the things on, over, or in the earth. This would include predators. It includes humans, even conservationists. It definitely includes Leopold, himself. He finds he "cannot love game and hate predators." He marvels at the complexity of the land organism. He answers his own question when he says, "who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering." As the world's foremost environmental doctor, Leopold has undertaken the medical practitioner's oath: first do no harm. The conservationist has by now witnessed the devastation of predator control policies, not only on the predators themselves, but on the forest and the very game the policies were meant to protect.
He broaches the problem of speciesism when he says, "American conservation is, I fear, still concerned for the most part with show pieces. We have not yet learned to think in terms of small cogs and wheels." He foresees the Endangered Species Act and the rescue of species such as the California condor, but laments our ability to provide suitable habitat that will sustain viable populations outside of museums, zoos, and a few refuges. More than this, though, Leopold has begun to formulate an ethic, at this point calling it "a refined taste in natural objects."
This refined taste can only be had through education, especially of those "who must extract a living from the land." Leopold here predicts the field of environmental economics, and even raises the question of green marketing at a time when nothing of the sort existed.
Finally, Leopold relates "harmony with land" to the highest ethical concepts of justice and liberty, saying, "the important thing is not to achieve, but to strive." This is ever Leopold's greatest piece of advice for all men and women, be they conservationists or not. In his own striving he continues to call for conservation education that builds a foundation for the ethical treatment of land in our children, "our signature to the roster of history."
Round River should not be dismissed because of its posthumous publication, as some would claim. Many works of our greatest thinkers and writers have only been published after their own deaths. In fact, it sometimes seems the publishing industry waits until the writer is dead so they can pay less in royalties. Good writing will be just as good in a hundred years, so why rush it?
Though Round River is good writing, what makes it important to the student of environmental issues is the window it gives us into the mind of one of our greatest environmentalists. It clearly portrays the growth of Aldo Leopold as a conservationist and as a writer.
Leopold defined an ecologist as one "skillful in seeing facts, ingenious in forming hypotheses, and ruthless in discarding them when they don't fit." Through the essays of Round River we see the maturing of Leopold's own philosophy, and his ability to live up to his own high ideals, standards, and definitions.
SOURCES
Fritzell, P. A. 1996. Aldo Leopold (1887-1948). Elder, J., ed. 1996. American Nature Writers. New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons.
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