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

17. Where Their Spirit Lives On

156 The spirit of Leopold and Ricketts persists, and there is some welcome evidence that it may be growing. It lies, at its most basic, in shacks, buildings that provide access to nature but do not get in the way. It is there in the hundreds of “rubber boot” biologists, usually working alone and often with little fanfare at remote sites—often field stations. It is found after midnight, in the mist over a springtime wetland, with spring peepers calling close by and crawfish frogs in the distance. It is found in a couple of beers and a cool, late-night skinny dip after a long, hot day on a shortgrass prairie. It is found among the smells inside old stone lab buildings. It is there in the eureka moment—an observation, and the realization that in the entire history of Earth and its humans, this is the first seeing. The spirit of Leopold and Ricketts is found in the rhythms of curators working in the back rooms of public museums; in the smells of their alcohol and formaldehyde, and the flip side smell of emerging into fresh air. It resides in the research and rearing chap ter sev enteen Where Their Spirit Lives On Where Their Spirit Lives On / 157 facilities of zoos and aquariums, where for some species, the last of their kind exist. It is found in the field trip—a professor driving and chatty, the van full of eager students. This spirit is deep in the graduate student who, with ruler and notebook in hand and soaked to the skin in the middle of a driving spring squall, says, “I’d still rather be doing this than sitting in front of my laptop.” The spirit of Leopold and Ricketts is found in the ideas that question convention and move a discipline forward, not in the ideologies that constrain and dictate.1 It is found in the many biologists who left the federal government over the past eight years because they would not be compromised, and in the many other biologists who stayed in order to resist the politicizing of their science. Professionally, the spirit of Leopold and Ricketts is found in the natural history facts, techniques, and perspectives that form the foundation of the best of modern ecology. It is ingrained in the roots of environmentalism; both Leopold and Ricketts anticipated the environmental movement and New Age thinking, including the notions of deep ecology, ecological holism, and the Gaia hypothesis. It is found in the “-ologies” that ground the newer discipline of conservation biology—including mammalogy, ornithology , herpetology, ichthyology, invertebrate biology, parasitology, phycology, and botany (a field that somehow avoided nomenclatural convention). These are subjects that are being taught less and less often, or are being presented superficially, at a time when the world desperately needs the expertise embodied in their details. The spirit of Leopold and Ricketts will not be found in a great deal of modern science. It will not be found in the minds of specialists . Nor is it in the minds of people centered on their careers. It will not be found in whiners or quitters. It will not be found 158 / Where Their Spirit Lives On in scientists who have grown old and tired, defensive, protective, and bitter. It is not in the minds of bureaucrats, especially those who take special joy in creating roadblocks to accomplishment. It does not reside in corporate junk science, or the “scientists” who profit from promoting the company line. It will not be found in the scientist whose first impulse following an achievement is to call a journalist. Dryballs (a favorite Ricketts term), one and all. The spirit of Leopold and Ricketts is woven into the fabric of people who have, in the words of Paul Hawken, “an older grace and intelligence” that runs counter to our current obsession with ourselves, and the destructiveness that accompanies such shortsightedness .2 Such grace and intelligence defines the children of Leopold and Ricketts. Because the spirit of Leopold and Ricketts is found in facts— in inductive, bottom-up thinking—it is also found, by extension, in grass roots movements; in civil society and in citizen-based organizations formed in response to society’s needs. In this way it provides a link between environmental justice and social justice . It is found in humble and respectful behavior, and in the reverse—people unafraid of...