Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work

Preface to the 2010 Edition

Preface to the 2010 Edition I N his influential essay "The Land Ethic," completed in the final year of his life, Aldo Leopold summarized the lessons he had learned across four decades as a conservation scientist, advocate, practitioner, and teacher. Leopold argued that the next phase of human ethical development must include the expansion of our sphere of moral concern to include the land. Only through such an expanded ethic, he held, could human and natural communities, in all their diversity, productivity, and beauty, function well and thrive together over the long run. "I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me," Leopold admitted . "It is rather the end-result of a life-journey, in the course of which I have felt sorrow, anger, puzzlement or confusion over the inability of conservation to halt the juggernaut of land abuse. "1 My purpose in writing this biography was to explore that "life journey " in order to understand more fully Leopold's continuing (and changing ) influence in conservation and American culture. This book first appeared in the spring of '988, a year after the centennial of Leopold's birth. By the 1980s Leopold was well recognized as a central figure in the history of conservation and environmental thought. For most, howeverincluding me-that reputation rested almost exclusively upon his authorship of the classic A Sand County Almanac. The centennial provided an opportunity to examine with fresh eyes the life behind the Almanac's timeless prose. One did not need special insight to see that there was much to learn about, and from, that life. All one needed was the opportunity (which happened to come my way) to learn something of his story and to read a bit into his other writings, published and unpublished. At the time much 1 AIdo Leopold, "Foreword" (lUlpublished foreword to A Sand County Almanac ), in Companion to A Sand County Almanac, edited by]. Baird Callicott (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 282. XVll Preface to the 20 IO Edition of Leopold's story was held in the memory of his aging contemporaries, and much of the documentary record was buried deep in archival vaults or lay dormant in library stacks. But even a small sampling of these sources was enough to excite the imagination. One did not need to be prophetic in the 1980s to understand that Leopold's legacy would grow more important in the years to come. As I worked on this book, the headlines of the day told the tale, across the nation and around the world: increasingly polarized environmental politics in Washington and in the American hinterland; continuing struggles to curtail land, water, and air pollution; economic crisis and ecological degradation across the agricultural Midwest; decline in America's older industrial cities and the relentless march of suburban development across the countryside; loss of open space and the isolation and fragmentation of wildlands; relentless cutting of America's old-growth forests, followed by wrenching change in forest-dependent communities and the demonization of the northern spotted owl; recognition of the destructive impacts of acid rain; depletion of the Earth's protective ozone layer and the global response leading to the 1987 Montreal Protocol; rising demands upon the world's fresh water supply; degradation of the oceans and commercial fisheries; accelerated loss of the world's biological diversity, especially in the species-rich tropical forests; the systematic piecing together of scientific understanding of global climate change. Leopold's vision of conservation as "a state of harmony" between people and land seemed both painfully remote and utterly necessary. Within months of this book's publication, extensive drought was searing much of the American landscape. Yellowstone burned. Media coverage of the fires fanned the political flames.2 Dr. James Hansen testified before Congress about climate change and the risks associated with increased greenhouse gas emissions-and political reaction to the science began to mount. Meanwhile, the fatal flaws in the Soviet Bloc had surfaced and the Cold War would soon come to its astonishing end. Some suggested that history itself ended with it.l No environmental historian, however, could be content with such a thesis. With the collapse of the Iron Curtain a new reality of change, promise, and challenge emerged, one in which the intertwined fate of humanity and the rest of creation would continue to unfold-for ill or good, with increasing wisdom or with compounded ignorance. Amid the turbulence, I found calm in my scholar's cocoon. AIda...