The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quotations and Commentaries

Introduction

Introduction In the autumn of 1949 a modest collection of essays on natural history and conservation appeared under the unassuming title A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. Its author, AIdo Leopold, was a highly respected figure within conservation circles, having made fundamental contributions to forestry, wildlife ecology and management, wilderness protection, and other fields during a forty-year career as a land manager, scientist, teacher, writer, and advocate. A Sand County Almanac would be Leopold's valedictory contribution to conservation. In April 1948, just one week after learning that Oxford University Press had accepted his manuscript for publication, Leopold died while fighting a grass fire on a neighbor's property near his family's "shack" in central Wisconsin. With publication of A Sand County Almanac the ripples from AIdo Leopold 's lifework began to move out beyond the core audience of conservation professionals. Leopold's insight into the complex "delights and dilemmas" of conservation allowed readers from all walks of life to fathom the far-reaching implications of our altered relationship with "things natural, wild, and free."1 AIdo Leopold changed the course of conservation: the way we think about it, the way we do it, the priority we give it on the roster of contemporary concerns, the connections we recognize between it and other domains of our lives. He saw clearly that environmental challenges could not be met through superficial solutions ; rather, they require constant self-examination of means and ends, of perceptions and values. Conservation by definition involves the ways in which we shape our hearts and our minds, and the social costs and benefits we assign in what he sometimes called "our land relations." But keen insight alone cannot account for Leopold's continuing influence . It was the evocative literary voice that gave A Sand County Almanac its staying power. As successive generations of readers have come to the Almanac, Leopold's ideas have remained vital in no small part because his writing remains vivid and distinct. With a handful of others Leopold stands as one of the twentieth century's preeminent conservation leaders. And as robust (to use WesJackson's word from this volume) as Leopold's vision was, his influence is likely to extend well into the next century. xiv Introduction xv The power of A Sand County Almanac reflects the lifetime of dedicated work, thought, and writing that preceded it. Leopold was a prolific writer throughout his career, his publications invariably tracking the leading trends in conservation science, philosophy, policy, and practice. Many of these lesser known writings have been made available to the public through the collections Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold (1953), Aldo Leopold's Wilderness: Selected Early Writings by the Author of "A Sand County Almanac" (1990; reprinted as Aldo Leopold's Southwest, 1995), and The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold (1991).2 However, a substantial amount of Leopold's writing remains inaccessible , buried deep in library and archival sediments. In this volume we have tried to gather up the well-known gems, but also to unearth other enduring nuggets of Leopold's prose. In the essay "Good Oak" from A Sand County Almanac, Leopold described how, in his local Wisconsin landscape, the preponderance of surviving oak seedlings at any given time can indicate the relative scarcity or abundance of seedling-nibbling rabbits. "Some day," he wrote, "some patient botanist will draw a frequency curve of oak birth-years, and show that the curve humps every ten years, each hump originating from a low in the ten-year rabbit cycle."~\ Just so maya patient historian someday trace the record of conservation thought by examining the frequency with which certain passages from Leopold have been invoked. For example, as the environmental movement gathered momentum in the 1960s and 1970s, the following passage from "The Land Ethic" rose to prominence: "Quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."4This famous passage, which J. Baird Callicott has characterized as Leopold's "summary moral maxim," reflected the need for guidelines by which reformers of the time could challenge the environmental status quo.s Yet it served a less immediate purpose as well. It became one...