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Aldo Leopold in the Southwest

Aldo Leopold described humanity’s greatest challenge as “living on a piece of land without spoiling it,” and his life and writings provide us with the insights and inspiration to do so.  Aldo Leopold’s legacy defies easy categorization. He is most widely-known as the author of A Sand County Almanac; published posthumously in 1949, the book has become a catalyst for our evolving ecological awareness and a classic in Western literature. Although he was trained as a forester, Leopold has also been cited for his work as an educator, philosopher, ecologist, and wilderness advocate.

Leopold developed an interest in the natural world at an early age. Born in 1887 and raised in Burlington, Iowa, he spent hours observing, journaling, and sketching his surroundings. Upon graduating, in 1909, from the Yale School of Forestry ’s fifth graduating class, he eagerly pursued a career with the newly established U.S. Forest Service in Arizona and New Mexico. By age 24, he had been promoted to Supervisor of the Carson National Forest in New Mexico.

Working in the southwest led Leopold to the idea of wilderness preservation.  The nation was just reaching a point, he argued, where running out of wilderness, previously unimaginable, was becoming possible.  In 1921, he published an article in the Journal of Forestry defending  America’s need for wilderness.  In it, he delineated a list of criteria for wilderness areas – namely “a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks’ pack trip, and devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.” – and suggested a number of places that would meet his requirements.  Of all the areas he considered of sufficient size, only three were completely undisturbed by roads and trails, and of these, he felt the headwaters of the Gila River to be the most attractive and the least conducive to development.  The Gila’s natural communities remained relatively intact, there had been very little grazing, and he felt setting it aside would not create undue economic loss.  In 1922, he submitted an official proposal to the Forest Service to manage the Gila National Forest as a Wilderness Area; it gained the first such official designation in 1924.

Shortly before the official announcement of the Gila’s wilderness designation, the Forest Service transferred Leopold to the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin.  In Wisconsin, Leopold adopted a piece of worn-out farmland, beginning an experiment in ecological restoration that would last him the rest of his life and inspire many of the essays in his famous book.  Professionally, he secured a position at the University of Wisconsin, becoming the nation’s first professor in the field that has since become known as wildlife ecology.

Despite living and working in the much less wild Midwest, the concept, definition, and most importantly value of wilderness would continue to develop and evolve in Leopold’s mind from primarily recreational to primarily scientific. In 1935, working with other prominent conservationists such as Bob Marshall, Olaus Murie, Robert Sterling Yard, and Benton MacKaye, Leopold helped to found The Wilderness Society as “one of the focal points of a new attitude—an intelligent humility toward man’s place in nature.”  By the 1940s Leopold realized that wilderness served as a benchmark, or standard, for evaluating the health of land anywhere and everywhere, providing critical evidence about our ability to in fact “live on a piece of land without spoiling it.”

Yet wilderness remained a deeply personal subject for Leopold, stemming from both the exhilarating  expeditions and the haunting mistakes of his early career in Arizona and New Mexico.  His humility shines most clearly in his “Thinking Like a Mountain” essay, in which he tells of shooting a wolf as a young forest ranger in Arizona.  He describes the incident:

“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.” Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

By the time he wrote the essay in 1944, Leopold had thirty years of hindsight to realize his early beliefs about the role of predators represented a narrow understanding of how ecological systems function.  The green fire in the wolf’s eyes had marked a turning point, revealing to Leopold the interconnectedness of the natural world.  By telling the story, he gives us hope that we can, in fact, heal past transgressions by moving to a new understanding of the land and accepting our responsibility for the health of the larger land community.

Read William Cronon's essay on Leopold and wilderness on EarthPortal.

Download printable Aldo Leopold Fact Sheet (2-page pdf file)

Notes

1. The wilderness and its place in forest recreational policy. J Forestry 19:7 (Nov 1921), 718-721.