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The Leopold Legacy Striving for Land Health on Private LandsBy Stan Temple Over the years Aldo Leopold penned many overlapping definitions of conservation, in the process tracing the evolution of his thinking on this complex subject. One of his definitions identified conservation as “a state of health in the land.”(1) Another characterized conservation as “a state of harmony between men and land.”(2) Still another concluded that “When the land does well for its owner, and the owner does well by his land; when both end up better by reason of their partnership, we have conservation.”(3) Land health, therefore, becomes an expected outcome of a harmonious and mutually beneficial relationship between a landowner and the land.
Leopold struggled throughout his career with how to overcome such obstacles. What would it take to induce land owners to pursue land health in the face of inclinations to do otherwise? “The crux of the problem is that every landowner is the custodian of two interests, not always identical, the public and his own. What we need is a positive inducement or reward for the landowner who respects both interests in his actual land practice. All conservation problems—erosion, forestry, game, wild flowers, landscapes—ultimately boil down to this.” (4) Always the tinkerer, Leopold experimented with several approaches before ultimately deciding on the most productive strategy. A Top Down Prescription Leopold began his professional career in the US Forest Service, where a “command-and-control” approach to management of public land allowed administrators and forest supervisors to set goals for the National Forests and dictate how they would be achieved by foresters working on the ground. When Leopold left the Forest Service and turned his attentions to conservation on private lands in the Midwest, it was perhaps not surprising that he considered using a similar top-down, regulatory approach to achieve land health. In 1924, he concluded that “... ultimately the use of all resources will have to be put under public regulation, regardless of ownership.” (5) The New Deal’s approach to conservation by government intervention allowed Leopold to evaluate this method in practice. He concluded, with respect to wildlife conservation on private farmland, that “…all the regulations in the world will not save our game unless the farmer sees fit to leave his land in a habitable condition for game.” (6) While never completely abandoning the usefulness of some coercive regulations, he turned his attention to alternative approaches. More on Private Lands Another top-down approach popular in the 1930s—and still employed today—involved economic incentives for conservation on private lands, and a variety of New Deal programs took this route. Leopold participated in several attempts to induce conservation by rewarding land owners. Among them were his experiment in hunter-subsidized game management on private farmlands at Riley, Wisconsin, and his participation in the large-scale, government-subsidized conservation project at Coon Valley, Wisconsin. Both relied primarily on economic incentives to encourage landowners to pursue land health. In 1934, Leopold observed that “Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.” (7) But, after observing firsthand the shortcomings of subsidized conservation, in1942 he changed his mind: “… the painless path of incentives and subsidies not only fails to lead us to land conservation, but sometimes actually retards the growth of critical intelligence on the whereabouts of alternative routes.” (8) He concluded that there must be a better way: “We tried to get conservation by buying land, by subsidizing desirable changes in land use, and by passing restrictive laws. The last method largely failed; the other two have produced only small samples of success.” (9) Regulations and subsidies have a role, but they can’t sustain land health. Regulations change, and subsidies don’t last forever. Too many landowners will abandon conservation practices when the coercions go away or the incentives no longer compete favorably with economic returns from other land uses. The current wave of withdrawals from the otherwise successful government-sponsored Conservation Reserve Program illustrates what happens when incentives fail to keep pace with rising commodity prices. A Personal Sense of Right and WrongLeopold reasoned that the solution had to involve an approach that came mainly from the landowner rather than an outside influence, and it had to be an enduring commitment. 
“We seem ultimately always thrown back on individual ethics as the basis of land conservation. It is hard to make a man, by pressure of law or money, do a thing which does not spring naturally from his own personal sense of right and wrong.” (10) This approach was the one that Leopold ultimately concluded was the most promising way to achieve land health, and it was on the basis of this that he began developing his ideas on a land ethic. “A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.” (11) Leopold was not an ivory-tower idealist with utopian dreams. He recognized that even though he had pointed the way, there would be challenges. “An issue may be so clear in outline, so inevitable in logic, so imperative in need, and so universal in importance as to command immediate support from any reasonable person. Yet that collective person, the public, may take a decade to see the argument, and another to acquiesce in an effective program.” (12) If only land health could be achieved in a few decades! Six decades after Leopold penned these words, pursuing land health on private lands remains a crucial endeavor for many reasons. Few tracts of public land are large enough to maintain healthy populations of all native species within their boundaries, and our parks, wilderness areas, and refuges are surrounded and impacted by activities on adjacent private lands. Of the approximately 1.9 billion acres of land in the 48 contiguous states, about 1.4 billion acres (over 70 percent) are in private hands. Almost 90 percent of the precipitation in the contiguous United States falls on private lands before making its way to streams, rivers, and lakes. Private lands hold over 90 percent of the most productive soils—making them extremely productive for agriculture as well as wildlife habitat. About 40 percent of our endangered species occur only on private lands. And, of course, private lands are where most of us live and work. In the end, Leopold provided both an ideal and realistic guidance. “Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.” (12) While that goal may be elusive, Leopold lights a brilliant lodestar—“We shall never achieve harmony with the land, anymore than we shall achieve justice or liberty for all people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve, but to strive…” (13) Stan Temple is a Senior Fellow with the Aldo Leopold Foundation. He is Professor Emeritus of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where for 32 years he occupied the teaching and research position once held by Aldo Leopold. He continues to strive toward land health by serving as an advisor to the foundation’s staff and board of directors, as a popular speaker, and through stewardship of his own 93 acres in south central Wisconsin. Works Cited
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It seems to be such a compelling outcome that one might expect most thinking land owners to pursue a harmonious relationship their land, thereby advancing land health and reaping the benefits for themselves and the public. Why would anyone resist harmony and mutual benefits? In reality, as Leopold knew well, these lofty ideals of conservation would not be easy to achieve. There are, in fact, many obstacles, among them: Maximizing economic returns from one’s land, exercising the privilege to do whatever one wants with private property, feeling no obligation to act in the public’s interest, suffering no consequences for abusing land, and simply being ignorant and unaware of how one’s activities affect land.