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3. A Blank Spot on the Map: Aldo Leopold
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CHAPTER 3 A Blank Spot on the Map: Aldo Leopold Aldo Leopold was, to borrow from the frontier vocabulary of which he was so fond, a pioneer in the cause of wilderness preservation. Through his writings and initiatives within the Forest Service, he pushed forward the cause of wilderness preservation like no other person of his time, at least until Bob Marshall began his crusade for wilderness areas in the 1930s. James Gilligan, in his influential dissertation on the development of Forest Service wilderness policy, canonized Leopold as the “Father of the National Forest Wilderness System.” Although this conclusion has elicited some challenges, most notably Donald Baldwin’s defense of Arthur Carhart’s claim to the title, the idea of wilderness preservation generally is considered among Leopold’s unique contributions to American environmental thought and policy.1 Leopold’s early wilderness idea, however, was a highly contingent one, rooted in his Forest Service milieu and tied to the technological and cultural developments of the 1910s and 1920s. This context was crucial in shaping Leopold’s perception that by the early 1920s a particular type of preservation should be undertaken in the national forests of the American West. His wilderness idea evolved as he broke his ties with the forests of the Southwest, and, in a different landscape, began to think and write about wilderness in more abstract terms. In fact, after a flurry of writings on wilderness in the mid-1920s, he drifted away briefly as he grappled with the complexities of game management and agricultural land use. Wildness, rather than wilderness, became his major concern during these years. But his wilderness advocacy was reawakened by the New Deal’s emergency conservation initiatives, of which he became an incisive critic. Indeed, it was largely this governmental assault on America’s remaining wild lands that prompted him to join in founding the Wilderness Society. 54 Leopold was undoubtedly one of the originators of the idea that led to the Wilderness Act of 1964. But rather than seeing his thought through the lens of that legislative achievement, I examine his wilderness thinking on its own terms. I think we have missed much of what Leopold was saying about wilderness because we have been so interested in tracing the lineage of current thinking. What exactly did Aldo Leopold mean by “wilderness” when he first started using the term, and what was new about the idea? How did wilderness preservation differ from the national park ideal, and why did Leopold feel the need to promote a new ideal so soon after the Park Service’s formation? Was his wilderness idea an upshot of the ecological sensibility that he helped to bring to American conservation, or did other factors and concerns shape his advocacy? Many scholars have dismissed Leopold’s early wilderness advocacy as immature because it was not imbued with the ecological outlook that made his later thought so influential. Craig Allin, for instance, concluded that Leopold’s “initial motivation towards wilderness preservation was more a matter of practicality than principle,” and Susan Flader has stated that “Leopold’s initial vision of wilderness was not exactly ‘pure’ . . . and there is little evidence in his early writing, even in the battery of articles he wrote in 1925 promoting a national wilderness system, of ecological thinking or any rationale beyond recreation.” Roderick Nash saw Leopold as “acting with only a vague rationale” in the early 1920s, when he first proposed that the Forest Service preserve wilderness areas.2 These conclusions are built on the assumption that the intellectual significance of Leopold’s wilderness advocacy was in its ecological insights. Later in his career, he did embrace an ecological argument for wilderness, and it is important to appreciate that development. But in focusing on his later thought, and assuming that it was somehow purer, scholars have overlooked many of the reasons why he felt so passionately about wilderness in the first place. Leopold’s early rationale for preserving wilderness was far from vague and unprincipled. Aware of ecological arguments being offered by others , he chose not to employ them. Instead, he justified wilderness preservation with a strong critique of trends in outdoor recreation. His wilderness idea took form in a mold fashioned by the era’s recreational boom, and it would retain that shape throughout his life. It was to stem the growth of road building, to control the automobile, and to temper recreational development of America’s public lands that Leopold first suggested the need for...