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

Ecology and Politics [1941]

Ecology and Politics [1941] To those who knew him personally, Aldo Leopold was above all a teacher. Wildlife Ecology 118, a general course he began offering in 1939 for liberal arts majors as well as wildlifers, was a memorable experience for those who were fortunate enough to enroll in it. Though he usually spoke from notes, he wrote out the introductory lecture for the spring 1941 term in its entirety. Disquieted by the darkening course of world history, he argues perhaps too freely by analogy from animal to human populations. Nevertheless, the lecture stands as a remarkable effort to come to terms with the ethical implications of ecology against the background of world war. Russell Lord, editor of The Land, was prepared to publish a slightly revised version as of April 1941 , but Leopold continued to work on it and in the end never did publish it. Like many professors, he was perhaps more willing to float new and incompletely explored ideas like these before students than to commit them to posterity. Ecology tries to understand the interactions between living things and their environment. Every living thing represents an equation of give and take. Man or mouse, oak or orchid, we take a livelihood from our land and our fellows, and give in return an endless succession of acts and thoughts, each of which changes us, our fellows, our land, and its capacity to yield us a further living. Ultimately we give ourselves. That this collective account between the earth and its creatures ultimately balances is implicit in the fact that both continue to live. It does not follow, however, that each species continues to live. Paleontology is a book of obsequies for defunct species. Man, for reasons sufficient to himself, would rather see than be one of the defunct. Fear of human extinction has been the drum beaten by every prophet, from St. John to the Los Angeles cults. But we modems, seeing science defeat one after another of St. John's four horsemen, have, until very recently, accepted the notion that our continuity is predestined and automatic. 281 282 Ecology and Politics There remains a doubt whether war, famine, and pestilence are the only horsemen to be feared. A new one, unnamed in holy writ, is now much in the headlines: a condition of unstable equilibrium between soils and waters, and their dependent plants and animals. Ecology is the attempt to understand what makes resources stable or unstable. Another new threat, perhaps even more serious, is the genetical deterioration of the human species. Ecology is here only a bystander, except in this sense; it offers abundant testimony that only healthy species achieve continuity. The emergence of these new apparitions does not mean that the original and authentic four are unsaddled. War, famine, and perhaps pestilence again thunder across the continents. War is a disruption of the give and take equation. What, if anything, can ecology say about it? Not much, except by analogy with animals. Whether such analogies are valid is anybody's guess. I shall try to sketch the human enterprise, in its relation to war, as it now appears to me. Every environment carries not only characteristic kinds of animals, but characteristic numbers ofeach. Thus the characteristic number of Indians in virgin America was small. More Indians would either have starved or killed each other off; fewer Indians would have risked annihilation of the race in some blizzard, drouth, or epidemic. Every animal in every land has its characteristic number. That number is the carrying capacity of that land for that species. When we arrived on the scene we raised the carrying capacity of the land for man by means of tools. Tools enable us to extract more livelihood from fewer acres, i.e. they change the "take" side of our biotic equation. But in so doing, they also change our "give" side, and also the equations for every fellow creature. Technology has wrought marvels in increasing our take, but it has largely ignored our give, and it has almost entirely ignored the adjustments forced on other animals and plants. Its fundamental assumption, so far, is that take can be increased indefinitely, and with it human populations. It is probably true that food can, by drawing on aerial and geological stores offertilizer, be increased indefinitely. But it is far from true, as Darwin once postulated, that animal populations are limited mainly by food. One of the most emphatic lessons of ecology is that animal populations are...