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

The Farmer as a Conservationist [1939]

The Farmer as a Conservationist [1939] In this masterpiece, originally a talk delivered at the University's Farm and Home Week in February 1939, Leopold distinguishes between conservation understood negatively as restraint and that understood positively as skill. Narrowly economic and utilitarian desiderata are contrasted with wider, less quantifiable human values. And the familiar refrain of conservation by government versus ecologically informed and esthetically and ethically motivated conservation by landowners is beautifully illustrated in a brief idyll of enlightened husbandry. After distribution as an extension circular, this essay was revised and published in American Forests. Conservation means harmony between men and land. When 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 . When one or the other grows poorer, we do not. Few acres in North America have escaped impoverishment through human use. If someone were to map the continent for gains and losses in soil fertility, waterflow, flora, and fauna, it would be difficult to find spots where less than three of these four basic resources have retrograded; easy to find spots where all four are poorer than when we took them over from the Indians. As for the owners, it would be a fair assertion to say that land depletion has broken as many as it has enriched. It is customary to fudge the record by regarding the depletion of flora and fauna as inevitable, and hence leaving them out of the account. The fertile productive farm is regarded as a success, even though it has lost most of its native plants and animals. Conservation protests such a biased accounting. It was necessary, to be sure, to eliminate a few species, and to change radically the distribution of many. But it remains a fact that the average American township has lost a score of plants and animals through indifference for everyone it has lost through necessity. What is the nature of the process by which men destroy land? What 255 256 The Farmer as a Conservationist kind of events made it possible for that much-quoted old-timer to say: "You can't tell me about farming; I've worn out three farms already and this is my fourth"? Most thinkers have pictured a process of gradual exhaustion. Land, they say, is like a bank account: if you draw more than the interest, the principal dwindles. When Van Hise said "Conservation is wise use," he meant, I think, restrained use. Certainly conservation means restraint, but there is something else that needs to be said. It seems to me that many land resources, when they are used, get out of order and disappear or deteriorate before anyone has a chance to exhaust them. Look, for example, at the eroding farms of the cornbelt. When our grandfathers first broke this land, did it melt away with every rain that happened to fall on a thawed frost-pan? Or in a furrow not exactly on contour? It did not; the newly broken soil was tough, resistant, elastic to strain. Soil treatments which were safe in 1840 would be suicidal in 1940. Fertility in 1840 did not go down river faster than up into crops. Something has got out of order. We might almost say that the soil bank is tottering, and this is more important than whether we have overdrawn or underdrawn our interest. Look at the northern forests: did we build barns out of all the pineries which once covered the lake states? No. As soon as we had opened some big slashings we made a path for fires to invade the woods. Fires cut off growth and reproduction. They outran the lumberman and they mopped up behind him, destroying not only the timber but also the soil and the seed. Ifwe could have kept the soil and the seed, we should be harvesting a new crop of pines now, regardless of whether the virgin crop was cut too fast or too slow. The real damage was not so much the overcutting, it was the run on the soiltimber bank. A still clearer example is found in farm woodlots. By pasturing their woodlots, and thus preventing all new growth, cornbelt farmers are gradually eliminating woods from the farm landscape. The wildflowers and wildlife are ofcourse lost long before the woodlot itselfdisappears. Overdrawing the interest from the woodlot bank is perhaps serious, but it is a bagatelle compared with destroying the capacity of...