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

The Ecological Conscience [1947]

The Ecological Conscience [1947] Delivered on June 27,1947, to the Conservation Committee of the Garden Club of America, this address was published later that year in the club's Bulletin. Parts of it were revised and incorporated in "The Land Ethic" in Sand County Almanac, upon which Leopold was simultaneously working. The body of the essay consists of case studies, one of which summarizes the complaints aired in "Adventures of a Conservation Commissioner," and its "Upshot" incorporates the perspective detailed in "Conservation: In Whole or in Part?" Everyone ought to be dissatisfied with the slow spread of conservation to the land: Our "progress" still consists largely of letterhead pieties and convention oratory. The only progress that counts is that on the actual landscape of the back forty, and here we are still slipping two steps backward for each forward stride. The usual answer to this dilemma is "more conservation education." My answer is yes by all means, but are we sure that only the volume of educational effort needs stepping up? Is something lacking in its content as well? I think there is, and I here attempt to define it. The basic defect is this: we have not asked the citizen to assume any real responsibility. We have told him that if he will vote right, obey the law, join some organizations, and practice what conservation is profitable on his own land, that everything will be lovely; the government will do the rest. This formula is too easy to accomplish anything worthwhile. It calls for no effort or sacrifice; no change in our philosophy of values. It entails little that any decent and intelligent person would not have done, of his own accord, under the late but not lamented Babbitian code. No important change in human conduct is ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphases, our loyalties, our affections, and our convictions. The proof that conservation has not yet touched these foundations of conduct lies in the fact that philosophy, ethics, and religion have not yet heard of it. 338 O&rden Club II11Ul000po 110 0-'1....1 'I'!a !OOLOOICAL C<.••SCHllCl!! A.ldo Leopold lI:Yeryone OU£ht to be d1..atbfled 1I'1t the IlOY apread at con.errat1~ ~~!~. "r-eU.', la tbWAl 1••• "'., .--..1; I",,~ 1) CUr !lprogre•• " .. cUll toa ..M ..if...£- .. -lotterheAd plath. and con....ntion oratory. 'Ille onlT progrd•• that COWlta ~ iI,OIl tha actual landoCl\pe ot the back fortT. a.n4 here we Are otlll ollpp1nc tyo- I tope beoJc.ord tor each tonard .trlde. ,- . 1\. .....-.... • ""-1 ....-- .... ,...... ~ ...u ..........--..., l.....:r ""-'- "'" ........, il."'( ~..L, IC ~_~ v6 LJ-.• .L.....J ~!rb...;t ~ ~I ...p ? ~ 11..--£:., 1• .(........' ~ ~ ot....... ...u......1f c .l./-...... J. \ ~e bade dotect Ie thle: we ha'Yo not ...lced the 01 thon to AI"""", lIllY NI8J. reoponolbllHy. We havo told b.1J! that It he 11'111 TOto rI&ht. obeT tho law. Join '0'" orgzuUl<&U0..... and pnt.etlce _ t con.onaUon 10 protitable on hlo own land. that ovorythinj; 1I'1l1 love 1y; the govol"l1llent .Ul do the root. 'lh1a tonal1. 10 .a:'oge*I,ar too """Y to "';co"",l1oh IUl)'thlnc worthwhile. It call. tor no etfort or o&Crltico; no chanee In our tll:llooophy ot veluao. It LtU. . enta1lo ~ :hat lIllY decent IUId l"teU1eent DOrooe would net hnve done,ot hie own accord/under the l ..te but not lAmented Iltlbo1t1aJl code. o important _ _ chl\n&e in l:um.n conduct 10 ever acooopliohed 1I'1thout en internal chen&e In our Intellectual Gpha.eo. our 10)'l\ltle•• our affectl0..... and our ro,.rlotlona. ~;.JIn our ~ to make conlervatloll OU1. we have cl.odaed Ito spiritual lcpl1caUono. 'Illo proof of thl. error 11e. in the fact \hAt phllolophy. ethicI, nnd religion 1\1\... not yet h8JU'd of It. Typescript of first page of "The Ecological Conscience," June 27, 1947, heavily edited in Leopold's hand. (Leopold Collection X25 2221, UW Archives) 339 340 The Ecological Conscience I need a short name for what is lacking; I call it the ecological conscience . Ecology is the science ofcommunities, and the ecological conscience is therefore the ethics of community life. I will define it further in terms of four case histories, which I think show the futility of trying to improve the face of the land without improving ourselves. I select these cases from my own state, because I am there surer of my facts. Soil Conservation Districts About 1930 it became clear to all except the ecologically blind that Wisconsin 's topsoil was slipping seaward. The farmers were told in 1933 that if they would adopt certain remedial practices for five years, the public would donate CCC labor to install them, plus the necessary machinery and materials . The offer was widely accepted, but the practices were widely forgotten when the five-year contract period was up. The farmers continued only those practices that yielded an immediate and visible economic gain for themselves. This partial failure of land-use rules written by the government led to the idea that maybe farmers would learn more quickly if they themselves wrote the rules. Hence, in 1937, the Wisconsin Legislature passed the Soil Conservation District Law. This said to the farmers, in effect: "We, the public, will furnish you free technical service and loan you specialized machinery, if you will write your own rules for land-use. Each county may write its own rules, and these will have the force of law." Nearly all the counties promptly organized to accept the proffered help, but after a decade of operation, no county has yet written a single rule. There has been visible progress in such practices as strip-cropping, pasture renovation, and soil liming, but none in fencing woodlots or excluding plow and cow from steep slopes. The farmers, in short, selected out those remedial practices which were profitable anyhow, and ignored those which were profitable to the community, but not clearly profitable to themselves. The net result is that the natural acceleration in rate of soil-loss has been somewhat retarded, but we nevertheless have less soil than we had in 1937. I hasten to add that no one has ever told farmers that in land-use the good of the community may entail obligations over and above those dictated by self-interest. The existence of such obligations is accepted in bettering rural roads, schools, churches, and baseball teams, but not in bettering the behavior of the water that falls on the land, nor in the preserving of the beauty or diversity of the farm landscape. Land-use ethics are still governed wholly by economic self-interest, just as social ethics were a century ago. To sum up: we have asked the farmer to do what he conveniently could to save his soil, and he has done just that, and only that. The exclusion of The Ecological Conscience 341 cows from woods and steep slopes is not convenient, and is not done. Moreover some things are being done that are at least dubious as conservation practices: for example marshy stream bottoms are being drained to relieve the pressure on worn-out uplands. The upshot is that woods, marshes, and natural streams, together with their respective faunas and floras, are headed toward ultimate elimination from southern Wisconsin. All in all we have built a beautiful piece of social machinery-the Soil Conservation District-which is coughing along on two cylinders because we have been too timid, and too anxious for quick success, to tell the farmer the true magnitude of his obligations. Obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to land. Paul Bunyan's Deer The Wisconsin lumberjack came very near accomplishing, in reality, the prodigious feats of woods-destruction attributed to Paul Bunyan. Following Paul's departure for points west, there followed an event little heralded in song and story, but quite as dramatic as the original destruction of the pineries: there sprang up, almost over night, an empire of brushfields. Paul Bunyan had tired easily of salt pork and corned beef, hence he had taken good care to see that the deer of the original pineries found their way regularly to the stewpot. Moreover there were wolves in Paul's day, and the wolves had performed any necessary pruning of the deer herd which Paul had overlooked. But by the time the brushfields sprang into being, the wolves had been wiped out and the state had passed a buck-law and established refuges. The stage was set for an irruption of deer. The deer took to the brushfields like yeast tossed into the sourdough pot. By 1940 the woods were foaming with them, so to speak. We Conservation Commissioners took credit for this miracle of creation; actually we did little but officiate at the birth. Anyhow, it was a herd to make one's mouth water. A tourist from Chicago could drive out in the evening and see fifty deer, or even more. This immense deer herd was eating brush, and eating well. What was this brush? It consisted of temporary short-lived sun-loving trees and bushes which act as a nurse crop for the future forest. The forest comes up under the brush, just as alfalfa or clover come up under oats or rye. In the normal succession, the brush is eventually overtopped by the forest tree seedlings, and we have the start of a new forest. In anticipation of this well known process, the state, the counties, the U.S. Forest Service, the pulp mills, and even some lumber mills staked out "forests" consisting, for the moment, of brush. Large investments of time, 342 The Ecological Conscience thought, cash, CCC labor, WPA labor, and legislation were made in the expectation that Nature would repeat her normal cycle. The state embarked on a tax subsidy, called the Forest Crop Law, to encourage landowners to hang onto their brushfields until they were replaced by forest. But we failed to reckon with the deer, and with deer hunters and resort owners. In 1942 we had a hard winter and many deer starved. It then became evident that the original "nurse-trees" had grown out of reach of deer, and that the herd was eating the oncoming forest. The remedy seemed to be to reduce the herd by legalizing killing ofdoes. It was evident that if we didn't reduce the herd, starvation would, and we would eventually lose both the deer and the forest. But for five consecutive years the deer hunters and resort owners, plus the politicians interested in their votes, have defeated all attempts at herd-reduction. I will not tire you with all the red herrings, subterfuges, evasions, and expedients which these people have used to befog this simple issue. There is even a newspaper dedicated solely to defaming the proponents of herdreduction . These people call themselves conservationists, and in one sense they are, for in the past we have pinned that label on anyone who loves wildlife, however blindly. These conservationists, for the sake ofmaintaining an abnormal and unnatural deer herd for a few more years, are willing to sacrifice the future forest, and also the ultimate welfare of the herd itself. The motives behind this "conservation" are a wish to prolong easy deer hunting, and a wish to show numerous deer to tourists. These perfectly understandable wishes are rationalized by protestations of chivalry to does and fawns. As an unexpected aftermath of this situation, there has been a large increase of illegal killing, and of abandonment of illegal carcasses in the woods. Thus herd-control, of a sort, is taking place outside the law. But the food-producing capacity ofthe forest has been overstrained for a decade, and the next hard winter will bring catastrophic starvation. After that we shall have very few deer, and these will be runty from malnutrition. Our forest will be a moth-eaten remnant consisting largely of inferior species of trees. The basic fallacy in this kind of "conservation" is that it seeks to conserve one resource by destroying another. These "conservationists" are unable to see the land as a whole. They are unable to think in terms of community rather than group welfare, and in terms of the long as well as the short view. They are conserving what is important to them in the immediate future, and they are angry when told that this conflicts with what is impor· tant to the state as a whole in the long run. There is an important lesson here: the flat refusal ofthe average adult to learn anything new, i.e., to study. To understand the deer problem requires some knowledge of what deer eat, of what they do not eat, and of how a The Ecological Conscience 343 forest grows. The average deer hunter is sadly lacking in such knowledge, and when anyone tries to explain the matter, he is branded forthwith as a long-haired theorist. This anger-reaction against new and unpleasant facts is of course a standard psychiatric indicator of the closed mind. We speak glibly of conservation education, but what do we mean by it? If we mean indoctrination, then let us be reminded that it is just as easy to indoctrinate with fallacies as with facts. Ifwe mean to teach the,capacity for independent judgment, then I am appalled by the magnitude of the task. The task is large mainly because of this refusal of adults to learn anything new. The ecological conscience, then, is an affair of the mind as well as the heart. It implies a capacity to study and learn, as well as to emote about the problems of conservation. Jefferson Davis' Pines I have a farm in one of the sand-counties of central Wisconsin. I bought it because I wanted a place to plant pines. One reason for selecting my particular farm was that it adjoined the only remaining stand of mature pines in the County. This pine grove is an historical landmark. It is the spot (or very near the spot) where, in 1828, a young Lieutenant namedJefferson Davis cut the pine logs to build Fort Winnebago. He floated them down the Wisconsin River to the fort. In the ensuing century a thousand other rafts of pine logs floated past this grove, to build that empire of red barns now called the Middle West. This grove is also an ecological landmark. It is the nearest spot where a city-worn refugee from the south can hear the wind sing in tall timber. It harbors one of the best remnants of deer, ruffed grouse, and pileated woodpeckers in southern Wisconsin. My neighbor, who owns the grove, has treated it rather decently through the years. When his son got married, the grove furnished lumber for the new house, and it could spare such light cuttings. But when war prices of lumber soared skyward, the temptation to slash became too strong. Today the grove lies prostrate, and its long logs are feeding a hungry saw. By all the accepted rules of forestry, my neighbor was justified in slashing the grove. The stand was even-aged; mature, and invaded by heart-rot. Yet any schoolboy would know, in his heart, that there is something wrong about erasing the last remnant of pine timber from a county. When a farmer owns a rarity he should feel some obligation as its custodian, and a community should feel some obligation to help him carry the economic cost of custodianship. Yet our present land-use conscience is silent on such questions. 344 The Ecological Conscience The Flambeau Raid The Flambeau was a river so lovely to look upon, and so richly endowed with forests and wildlife, that even the hard-bitten fur traders of the free-booting 1700's enthused about it as the choicest part of the great north woods. The freebooting 1800's expressed the same admiration, but in somewhat different terms. By 1930 the Flambeau retained only one 50-mile stretch of river not yet harnessed for power, and only a few sections of original timber not yet cut for lumber or pulp. During the 1930's the Wisconsin Conservation Department started to build a state forest on the Flambeau, using these remnants of wild woods and wild river as starting points. This was to be no ordinary state forest producing only logs and tourist camps; its primary object was to preserve and restore the remnant of canoe-water. Year by year the Commission bought land, removed cottages, fended offunnecessary roads, and in general started the long slow job of re-creating a stretch of wild river for the use and enjoyment of young Wisconsin. The good soil which enabled the Flambeau to grow the best cork pine for Paul Bunyan likewise enabled Rusk County, during recent decades, to sprout a dairy industry. These dairy farmers wanted cheaper electric power than that offered by local power companies. Hence they organized a cooperative REA and applied for a power dam which, when built, will clip off the lower reaches of canoe-water which the Conservation Commission wanted to keep for recreational use. There was a bitter political fight, in the course of which the Commission not only withdrew its opposition to the REA dam, but the Legislature, by statute, repealed the authority of the Conservation Commission and made County Commissioners the ultimate arbiters of conflict between power values and recreational values. I think I need not dwell on the irony of this statute. It seals the fate of all wild rivers remaining in the state, including the Flambeau. It says, in effect, that in deciding the use of rivers, the local economic interest shall have blanket priority over state-wide recreational interests, with County Commissioners as the umpire. The Flambeau case illustrates the dangers that lurk in the semi-honest doctrine that conservation is only good economics. The defenders of the Flambeau tried to prove that the river in its wild state would produce more fish and tourists than the impounded river would produce butterfat, but this is not true. We should have claimed that a little gain in butterfat is less important to the state than a large loss in opportunity for a distinctive form of outdoor recreation. We lost the Flambeau as a logical consequence ofthe fallacy that conservation can be achieved easily. It cannot. Parts of every well-rounded conser- The Ecological Conscience 345 vation program entail sacrifice, usually local, but none-the-Iess real. The farmers' raid on our last wild river is just like any other raid on any other public wealth; the only defense is a widespread public awareness of the values at stake. There was none. The Upshot I have described here a fraction of that huge aggregate of problems and opportunities which we call conservation. This aggregate of case-histories show one common need: an ecological conscience. The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community, and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people. It cannot be right, in the ecological sense, for a farmer to drain the last marsh, graze the last woods, or slash the last grove in his community, because in doing so he evicts a fauna, a flora, and a landscape whose membership in the community is older than his own, and is equally entitled to respect. It cannot be right, in the ecological sense, for a farmer to channelize his creek or pasture his steep slopes, because in doing so he passes flood trouble to his neighbors below, just as his neighbors above have passed it to him. In cities we do not get rid of nuisances by throwing them across the fence onto the neighbor's lawn, but in water-management we still do just that. It cannot be right, in the ecological sense, for the deer hunter to maintain his sport by browsing out the forest, or for the bird-hunter to maintain his by decimating the hawks and owls, or for the fisherman to maintain his by decimating the herons, kingfishers, terns, and otters. Such tactics seek to achieve one kind of conservation by destroying another, and thus they subvert the integrity and stability of the community. If we grant the premise that an ecological conscience is possible and needed, then its first tenet must be this: economic provocation is no longer a satisfactory excuse for unsocial land-use, (or, to use somewhat stronger words, for ecological atrocities). This, however, is a negative statement. I would rather assert positively that decent land-use should be accorded social rewards proportionate to its social importance. I have no illusions about the speed or accuracy with which an ecological conscience can become functional. It has required 19 centuries to define decent man-to-man conduct and the process is only half done; it may take as long to evolve a code of decency for man-to-Iand conduct. In such matters we should not worry too much about anything except the direction in which 346 The Ecological Conscience we travel. The direction is clear, and the first step is to throw your weight around on matters of right and wrong in land-use. Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays. That philosophy is dead in human relations, and its funeral in land-relations is overdue. Publications of AIdo Leopold Index ...