Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab: The Emergence of Environmentalism

12. Leopold’s Approach

117 Nina Leopold Bradley wrote in her remembrance, “A Daughter’s Reflections,” “In an essay found among my father’s works, he had written, ‘there are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.’”1 More than anything else, it is this second interest that forms the basis of what we think about when his name is mentioned. And it is this curiosity that drove Leopold’s ecological thinking. Franklin Roosevelt’s adviser on soil, Hugh Hammond Bennett, wrote, “of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized.” The Dust Bowl, he said, was “sinister,” a symptom of our “stupendous ignorance.”2 But, as Timothy Egan notes, “Most scientists did not take Bennett seriously. . . . Basic soil science was one thing but talking about a fragile web of life and slapping the face of nature—this kind of early ecology had yet to find a wide audience. Sure, Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir had made conservation an American value at the dawn of the new century, chap ter t w elv e Leopold’s Approach 118 / Leopold’s Approach but it was usually applied to brawny, scenic wonders: mountains, rivers, megaflora.” Egan then points out that “in 1933, a game biologist in Wisconsin, Aldo Leopold, had published an essay that said man was part of the big organic whole and should treat his place with special care. But that essay, ‘The Conservation Ethic,’ had yet to influence public policy.”3 In the 1920s and through much of the early 1930s, when Leopold used the term land he usually meant “soil.” His interest in soil quality and stability came from his early days as a forester in Arizona and New Mexico, where he saw firsthand the effects of grazing on stream courses and the surrounding landscape. This interest continued with, indeed was reaYrmed by, the drought of the middle 1930s and the Dust Bowl that followed. But later, Meine explains, as new experiences and his seminal work at the Shack influenced his thinking, “Leopold was using the word ‘land’ as a catch-all term for the environment; it included ‘soils, water systems, and wild and tame plants and animals.’”4 In 1936 and again in 1937, Leopold traveled to Chihuahua, Mexico. Here, he said, he “first clearly realized that land is an organism, that all my life I had seen only sick land, whereas here was a biota still in perfect aboriginal health. The term ‘unspoiled wilderness’ took on a new meaning.”5 Appreciating this, he became increasingly interested in defining what he called “land health.” He turned to science, and recognized that “stability and diversity were the [ecological] concepts that seemed best suited for a critical appraisal of land, be it a wilderness or a dust bowl.” He then asked, “What, in the evolutionary history of this flowering earth, is more closely associated with stability? The answer, to my mind, is clear: diversity of fauna and flora.”6 Although this insight seemed intuitive to Leopold, and seems intuitive to us, Leopold’s Approach / 119 as a general rule the relation between diversity and stability is not well grounded in fact; ecologists have struggled, and continue to struggle, with defining broad relationships between these two ecosystem concepts.7 Much to his credit, Leopold realized that he was reaching “beyond the range of scientific evidence.” In the late 1930s, most ecologists had not even reached the point of asking questions about ecosystem qualities, let alone gathered data to measure them. Leopold wrote, “The best we can do, at least at present, is to recognize and cultivate the general conditions which seem to be conducive to [stability]. Stability and diversity are associated. Both are the endresult of evolution to date. To what extent are they interdependent? Can we retain stability in used land without retaining diversity also?”8 Leopold expanded this thinking to consider land as an organism , and he wasn’t simply thinking metaphorically. “The land consists of soil, water, plants, and animals, but health is more than a suYciency of these components. It is a state of vigorous selfrenewal in each of them, and in all collectively. Such collective functioning of interdependent parts for the maintenance of the whole is characteristic of an organism. In this sense...