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1 FOREST ECOLOGY AND MANAGEMENT ~ Axe-in-Hand Susan L. Flader AIdo Leopold began his career as a forester. He entered Yale University in 1905, intent on a career in the newly established U.S. Forest Service, and upon graduation with his master's degree in forestry in 1909 was assigned to map and cruise timber in the Arizona Territory. From the start he was deeply imbued with the utilitarian conservation philosophy espoused by the service's first chief, Gifford Pinchot. But also from the start he pushed foresters toward a broader definition of their responsibilities and more thoughtful consideration of the objectives of forest management. Half a century after his death, during which time forestry in America has moved away from rather than toward his vision, Leopold is once again pointing the way to the future for his profession. A band of renegades formed an Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics in 1989. Inspired by Leopold's writing, the profession's key arbiter, the Society ofAmerican Foresters, in the early 1990s engaged in an exhaustive process of adding a land ethic to their canon. Then in 1992 the chief of the Forest Service, with specific reference to Aldo Leopold , promulgated a new philosophy of ecosystem management to replace Gifford Pinchot's resource conservation philosophy as the service entered the twenty-first century.! Since then Leopold's ideas have been at the center of the continuing debate about ecosystem management. The ebb and flow in the receptivity offoresters and other land managers to AIdo Leopold's message is owing to larger forces in our society, but the fact that Leopold is still regarded as a guiding light reflects the clarity and credibility of his message and the depth of experience in which it was grounded. At a time when the national forests were devoted by law to conservation of timber and water, Leopold in one of his earliest publications, a 1913 letter to his fellow officers of the Carson National Forest in New Mexico, laid out virtually the entire range of purposes-"Timber, water, forage, farm, recreative, game, fish, and esthetic resources"-that would 3 4 Part 1. Conservation Science and Practice be enshrined half a century later in the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960.2 All that was missing was wilderness, but Leopold would soon become the leading advocate for wilderness preservation as well. Even more significant in his 1913 essay, however, was his emphasis on measuring successful management by "the effect on the Forest," rather than by mere adherence to official policies and procedures.3 It was this preoccupation with what actually happened on the ground, with what we now call the forest ecosystem, that marked Leopold as a person ofvision. Leopold's Carson letter was written at a time when he was recuperating from a serious illness that would force him to give up his youthful ambition to be a forest supervisor only two years after having attained it. For the remainder of his career in the Southwest he would serve in a succession of regional office positions in which he would seek to broaden the scope of national forest administration and improve the quality of forest ecosystems. He initiated game management programs modeled on principles of forest management, promoted wilderness hunting grounds as a form of recreational land designation, and even advocated sanitary engineering (of recreation facilities) as a new sideline for foresters. But perhaps his most far-reaching contributions came in the realm of ecological interpretation as he sought to discern the interactions of grass, brush, timber, and fire on Southwestern watersheds in his capacity as a forest inspector. With an ever open and inquiring mind, Leopold observed the marked increase in soil erosion, the continuing replacement of grass by unpalatable brush, the pattern of fire scars on ancient junipers, and the growth of yellow pine in dense, stunted thickets. In what was rank heresy in an agency dedicated to growing and harvesting trees, committed to absolute fire prevention, and funded largely by grazing fees, he argued that grass was a more effective watershed cover than trees and that fire, which was necessary to maintain grass cover, was less destructive than grazing. And he drove home the point: "15 years of Forest administration were based on an incorrect interpretation of ecological facts and were, therefore, in part misdirected. "4 The Leopold who so boldly challenged the Forest Service by pointing out the implications of ecological interpretation was then chief of operations...

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