How a Wolf Transformed Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Worldview
The origin of one of the most influential ideas in environmentalism
In Aldo Leopold’s 1949 classic of environmental philosophy, A Sand County Almanac, there is a moment where he describes his encounter with a dying wolf. The wolf wasn’t dying from natural causes. It was dying because he and his hunting companions just shot her.
“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes — something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view” ([1949] 2001, 129).
Leopold describes this encounter as a moment when he is transformed — converted — to a new way of thinking about human-animal relationships.
Somehow, the wolf’s fiery green gaze ejects Leopold from his dull and confined human-centeredness into a more expansive ecological awareness of human-nonhuman interdependence.
