The River of the Mother of God: and other Essays by Aldo Leopold

INTRODUCTION

Introduction Aldo Leopold's writing was remarkably wide-ranging. He addressed a broad spectrum of topics and mastered a number of literary genres. Nevertheless, almost all ofLeopold's diverse interests as well as his varied professional career orbited around a stable center, land conservation, and the condensed essay was his preferred and perfected medium of expression. Throughout his life, Leopold returned periodically to topics on which he had written before, rearmed with fresh experience, new information, and critical reflection. And he was as keen a learner as he was a teacher. The papers included in this volume span a period of nearly half a century. In them one can see the author's thinking on a variety of distinct but interrelated themes evolving, becoming gradually richer, clearer, more subtle, and more profound.1 The chronological arrangement of this collection of papers, most of which are short essays, precludes the other natural alternative of grouping them into categories by subject. The purpose of this introduction is to identify the recurrent themes found in Leopold's hitherto less accessible literary estate and to trace their development diachronically. The Almanac Themes and Their Evolution Among the last things Leopold wrote before his untimely death was the foreword to A Sand County Almanac. In it he identified the major burdens of his book-ecology, esthetics, and ethics-and stated simply that "these essays attempt to weld these three concepts."2 In this collection, we can follow the evolution of Leopold's thinking on these topics, which were the concerns most important to him at the end of his life and the most familiar to his public. Conservation Ecology Some scientists see their work as separate from economics, politics, religion, and philosophy. Aldo Leopold could not so compartmentalize his thinking. 3 4 Introduction He consciously strove for an integrative understanding. Hence, for Leopold ecology was never just a pure science among other sciences. Nor was it for him merely an applied science, a means to an end, a tool to get more productivity from range, forest, and farm. For Leopold ecology was also a way of perceiving and comprehending that called into question the human ends as well as the means inherited from earlier epochs. During Leopold's lifetime ecology came of age. The stages in its maturation are reflected in the evolution of Leopold's ecological worldview. To one degree or another ecology informs almost all these papers, but in some its larger implications are expressed in a particularly pure and pointed way. The ecological science that Leopold first encountered in his forestry training at Yale was plant ecology, an essentially descriptive schema in botany developed in Henry C. Cowles's studies of plant succession on the sand dunes of Lake Michigan and Frederick E. Clements's work on "plant formations " and "climax" vegetation in Nebraska.3 Early animal ecologists followed the lead of their botanical colleagues and sketched the fauna into the successional seres. Ecology had yet to take a functional approach to the total environment. Thus in Leopold's early writing it is not surprising to find certain dogmas that were uncritically based upon contemporaneous ecological theory and canonized in forestry. For example, Leopold supported the tenet that forest fires should always be prevented because they set back succession in "Piute Forestry vs. Forest Fire Prevention" (1920). But the clearest indication of the limits of Leopold's early ecological thinking was his leadership in the effort to remove predators from southwestern forests and ranges in order to protect game, illustrated in "The Varmint Question." In 1915, when he began to organize game protective associations, "varmints" seemed expendable . It would be at least a decade before he started to sense that wolves and grizzlies might have a redeeming natural function and more than two decades before he would call explicitly for their preservation and restoration in "Threatened Species" (1936). Public acknowledgment of his personal intellectual transformation, which came in his review of Young and Goldman's The Wolves o/North America, would require yet another decade.4 It is revealing that Leopold's most significant early advances in ecological thinking came not in game management, his chosen specialty, a field in which he was perhaps more committed to ground that he himself had previously staked out, but rather in watershed management, a field quite removed from his previous training and experience. This aspect of management dealt with ~hat Leopold regarded as the most fundamental of all resources: the land itself. "Grass, Brush, Timber...