Aldo Leopold’s Life and Legacy
In this excerpt from A Fierce Green Fire author Marybeth Lorbiecki explores the continuing legacy of Aldo Leopold and his famed work A Sand County Almanac.
Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted
until progress began to do away with them.
Now we face the question whether a still higher “standard of living”
is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.
For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese
is more important than television,
and the chance to find a pasque- flower
is a right as inalienable as free speech.
Foreword, A Sand County Almanac
…
After a long day of rain, wind, and swampy portages, we pitch our tent. A misty blanket settles over the melon- tinted horizon, and the long, eerie trill of a loon drifts over air. Neither humming motors nor their exhaust dull our spirits. City lights do not dim the skies. The stars are crisp and startling in the blackness, and the air smells of pine. Later, if we are lucky, the distant howl of a wolf will jerk us out of sleep.
It’s hard to imagine what this beloved place and the American landscape might look like if Aldo Leopold hadn’t come along when he did. Would my tenting spot in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA), atop a slab of pine-dotted granite, now be the site of a tourist condominium? Would the forests of the Southwest have declined into desert? How many game species, like deer, quail, woodcocks, and various waterfowl, would have gone extinct? And wolves — would they too have been completely hunted, trapped, or poisoned away?
Aldo Leopold was a game changer in every aspect of the conservation movement. His famed book of personal essays A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There has been dubbed “the conservationist’s bible” and Leopold, an American prophet. For those of us who have often read the Almanac, his words are as familiar as our backpacks, canoes, and walking sticks. They evoke that other world in which we leave behind our cell phones and shake off the burdens of overstuffed calendars, eye-straining computers, dull textbooks and electronic notebooks, and traffic. His words urge us to rethink who we are and how we are living.
Aldo Leopold was a game changer in every aspect of the conservation movement. His famed book of personal essays A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There has been dubbed “the conservationist’s bible” and Leopold, an American prophet.
For those who have not read the Almanac, his words sound like those of a contemporary environmentalist. Though Leopold died in 1948, his writings, research, and teaching have formed the framework of discussions about land use, wildlife, and earth restoration for nearly a century. Leopold wrote the first Watershed Handbook for the US Forest Service to prevent soil loss and organized early game societies in the West to conserve overhunted wildlife. His groundbreaking field studies offered the first widespread field data to connect the rapid loss of species to the rapid loss of habitat (intensified by overhunting).
Leopold and his associates at the Forest Service and Wilderness Society also put the wilderness debate on the public agenda. Because of them, and his persistent colleague Howard Zahniser and the Wilderness Society, the Wilderness Act was passed in 1964 and has come to protect more than 100,000 acres of diverse national gems, like the BWCA. Leopold’s proposal that established first national wilderness area — the Gila Wilderness, in New Mexico — marked its 90th year in 2014 and the Wilderness Society celebrated 80 years in 2015. This wilderness protection movement, so close to Leopold’s heart, is now an international phenomenon, crossing even into the realm of ocean wilderness sanctuaries.
Yet how many Americans have even heard of Leopold? Not enough. Perhaps Leopold was simply involved in too many aspects of American conservation to be pigeonholed into an easily remembered historical slot. Or maybe he was just too far ahead of his time. Leopold challenged our whole way of thinking and living — “to change ideas about what land is for is to change ideas about what anything is for.”
Scientists and activists are tired of sounding alarms. People are tired of hearing them. Yet the earth doesn’t pause for us to catch up, and it doesn’t lie. As we debate what to do, it goes on, staying true to its systems.
We stand at the crossroads in times even more stressed and precarious than Aldo Leopold’s own of the Dust Bowl, Great Depression, World War II, species hunted into extinction, drained marshes, and logged-out pineries. Now we are experiencing these same problems on a planetary scale: climate chaos; international recessions; civil wars, terrorism, and exhausted refugees; multiplying extinctions on land and sea; massive deforestation, wetlands and grasslands loss; widespread drought, wildfires, and desertification; draining aquifers and loss of drinkable water; increasingly frequent and virulent hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, and floods; collapsing ocean systems. It makes it hard to sleep, hard to get a grasp on what to actually do that will make enough difference — especially with all the competing information, political fighting, and lack of will in the public sphere.
Scientists and activists are tired of sounding alarms. People are tired of hearing them. Yet the earth doesn’t pause for us to catch up, and it doesn’t lie. As we debate what to do, it goes on, staying true to its systems. When the atmospheric system gets overloaded with carbon, the oceans absorb some of it, turning the oceans slowly into carbonic acid. At the same time, the hot rays of the sun get caught by the greenhouse gasses and pile on the blankets of heat, nursing a pollution-induced fever, melting icebergs and tundra, and throwing off currents, weather systems, migration patterns. No small deals.
Though we can recognize all of this, it’s not enough. We hope for a way to connect all the dots, especially to our own lives. Scientific facts simply aren’t enough to plot a communal and individual path of response. Neither is technology. Instead it comes down to what we value and what vision of a planetary future we want for ourselves and for those to follow us. In short, we need ethics — a cultural understanding of the whole and our relationship to it. As Aldo observed, we need both an ecological education and an “ecological conscience.” He explained, “No important change in human conduct is ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphases, our loyalties, our affections, and our convictions.”
Marybeth Lorbiecki, M.A., has long been involved in the field of ecological ethics and conservation. Currently she is editor and the director of Interfaith Oceans (formerly Interfaith Ocean Ethics Campaign).
