Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab: The Emergence of Environmentalism by Michael J. Lannoo (review)

Thoreau’s hut at Walden Pond; John Muir’s Sierra cabin; Aldo Leopold’s central Wisconsin shack; Ed Ricketts‘s Monterey lab; Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor Joyous Garde gazebo; John Haines’s Tanana River, Alaska, homestead; Jim Harrison’s northern Michigan granary; and many other equally intriguing writing aeries, hideaways, and studios: in a country that worships hugeness, amplitude, blockbuster size, and the trendiest mega deal, much of America’s best thinking and writing—especially about the environment—has been carried out in small, intimate, tucked-away buildings situated at the edgy, limnal intersection between the civic and natural worlds. We are not talking “man caves,” those obscenely fashionable retreats designed for solipsistic personal entertainment, but hand-hewn shacks, cabins, huts, sheds, and their like. Unpretentious, serviceable domains, set away from the constant disruptions of daily life, act as “base camps for exploration” (5), as Michael Lannoo rightly claims in this delightfully written monograph.

Biologist, conservationist, ecologist, and recognized authority on amphibians, the author is Professor of Anatomy and Cell Biology at Indiana University’s School of Medicine in Terre Haute, where he directs the Lannoo Lab and, like Leopold and Ricketts, seems as much at home in the lab as in the field. (Lannoo’s most recent book, The Iowa Lakeside Laboratory: A Century of Discovering the Nature of Nature, continues his dual fascination.) Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab: The Emergence of Environmentalism is enlivened throughout by Professor Lannoo’s admiration for two of his “longtime heroes” (xiii). But far from creating uncritical hagiography, Lannoo’s personal investment gives his project the right blend of intimate air and scholarly objectivity, due in large part to his impressive familiarity with all relevant scholarship on both major figures, and to his quickly paced narrative style. It is not often that an academic book can be called a page turner, but this one certainly is.

Functioning as both hard fact and as conceptual trope, Leopold’s Baraboo, Wisconsin, shack (originally a chicken coop) and Ricketts’ Pacific Biological Laboratory allow Lannoo to link two pioneering figures in twentieth-century environmental awareness. “The concept of ‘shack,’” Lannoo claims, “works as a metaphor for a grounded, bottom-up, facts-based approach to thinking and to living”(5). Neither man held a Ph.D., but they were “freethinkers” who read and interpreted the signs and texts of nature with exceptional clarity and insight, recorded them faithfully in numerous journals, letters, and later, of course, in influential books, all of which created legions of fans and followers, including Leopoldian disciples and Rickettsian “Ed Heads.” These “spectacular men,” Lannoo claims, “should be embraced for being so impressively progressive as judged by the standards of their time, and in some cases still by the standards of ours” (140). Their output was relatively slim—two major books each—but those books were truly special. Leopold’s Game Management (1933) and the posthumous Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (1949) and Ricketts’s Between Pacific Tides (1939), written with Jack Calvin, and Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (1941), written with John Steinbeck, had far reaching influence and changed the way conservation work and marine biology was conducted.

The way in which Leopold’s and Ricketts’s reputations and influence have increased exponentially since their deaths nearly seventy years ago bears out Lannoo’s claim. Between Pacific Tides, the first field guide to the Pacific’s intertidal fauna organized on ecological principles, not taxonomic ones, had a bumpy road to publication and was roundly criticized by Stanford University Press’s manuscript reviewers before the Press eventually published it. Not to worry: a fifth edition of Between Pacific Tides is still in print and widely regarded as a model marine science text. A facsimile of the complete Sea of Cortez, with Steinbeck’s narrative Log and Ricketts’s Pyhletic Catalog, is thankfully once again available, this...