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

The Role of Wildlife in a Liberal Education [1942]

The Role ofWildlife in a Liberal Education [1942] Leopold reflects candidly on the employment prospects of wildlife professionals during and after the war in this presentation to the seventh North American Wildlife Conference, subsequently published in the Transactions. As in "The State of the Profession," he sees a professional opportunity in all-campus courses, but more important an opportunity, through the window of wildlife, to inculcate an understanding of "land ecology" in the lay student and thus eventually in the community at large. The essay may be read as a statement ofthe philosophy underlying his own Wildlife Ecology 118 at the University ofWisconsin. Most of the wildlife education so far attempted is that designed to teach professionals how to do their job. I here discuss another kind: that aimed to teach citizens the function of wildlife in the land organism. The two kinds contrast sharply in their war status. Perhaps the output of professionals is now excessive, even if there were no war. On the other hand, wildlife teaching for laymen has the same war status as any other branch of science or of the arts; to suspend teaching it is to suspend culture. Culture is our understanding of the land and its life; wildlife is an essential fraction of both. The bulk of our funds and brains are invested in professional education . In my opinion it is time to "swap ends" to curtail sharply the output of professionals, and to throw the manpower and dollars thus released into a serious attempt to tell the whole campus, and thus eventually the whole community, what wildlife conservation is all about. To see our predicament clearly, we must see its history. When wildlife education started a decade ago, three strong forces impelled us to our present course. One was the obvious preference for preparing men to earn a salary rather than to live a life. 301 302 The Role of Wildlife in a Liberal Education The second was the depression. The pump-priming policy sucked at the conservation schools like a waterspout. Anyone bearing a sheepskin, wet or dry, could soar into the clouds as a paid expert. The third was expediency. It is easier to teach wildlife to a professional student in 3 years than to a lay student in a semester or two. Once a professional enrolls he must listen, be the teaching good, bad, or indifferent. On the other hand the lay student elects wildlife courses; if the teaching is not vital, he can elect something else. To what extent are these three pulls still pulling? Depression is dead. Expediency is no argument. The question, then, boils down to future jobs. Bureaus are now laying plans for another postwar pump-priming era, but it is a mystery to me where we are to find either the cash or the credit for a repetition of 1933. I do not anticipate a post-war boom in "wildlifers." If I am right, and the market for professionals continues poor, then the deans and the presidents and the donors of wildlife funds will have the option of either shrinking the present schools, or switching their emphasis from professional to liberal teaching. It is not likely that this switch can be made successfully if postponed until the eleventh hour. The time to start is now. Fortunately the process of conversion does not call for a complete abandonment of professional output. All-campus teaching cannot be vital without research, and research is not possible without assistants, experimental areas, and definite local projects. This residuum of research can be made to produce a small high-grade annual crop of professionals at the same time that it feeds the all-campus teaching effort with vital local facts and questions. In my own unit, I began this conversion 3 years ago, when the present overproduction of professionals first became visible. The response from the campus-at-Iarge has been gratifying. I would recommend the change to others, even if there were no war to force the issue. Liberal education in wildlife is not merely a dilute dosage of technical education. It calls for somewhat different teaching materials and sometimes even different teachers. The objective is to teach the student to see the land, to understand what he sees, and enjoy what he understands. I say land rather than wildlife, because wildlife cannot be understood without understanding the landscape as a whole. Such teaching could well be called land ecology rather than wildlife, and could serve very broad educational...