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

Notes

163 PREFACE 1. Susan F. Beegel, Susan Shillinglaw, and Wesley N. Tiffney Jr., eds., Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches (Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press, 1997), 20. 2. I also selected them because they have been around me for a long time. In 1975, my freshman year at Iowa State, my English composition teacher was an elderly man who, on the first day of class, said, “You can write about anything that interests you. One of my best friends was Paul Errington, the world’s expert on muskrats.” Paul Errington was also the first leader of the first Fish and Wildlife Cooperative Unit, which J.N. “Ding” Darling set up at Iowa State University. Errington was Leopold ’s protégé (but was not, as is often claimed, his student). That was my indirect introduction to Leopold. Three years later, at the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory (where I was taking courses in buildings Ding Darling had the Milford Civilian Conservation Corps build in 1937), a graduate student , observing our social tendencies (which were probably no different from anyone else’s at any other field station in any other time period), said, “They write books about what you guys do. Get Steinbeck’s Log NOTES 164 / Notes to Pages xiv–xv from the Sea of Cortez and read about it.” I did, and that was my introduction to Ricketts. I have a second connection to Ricketts. His favorite teacher was W.C. Allee, who was the PhD adviser of my first mentor, Dick Bovbjerg. As Richard Astro writes (John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972], 5), “almost to a man Allee’s students approached or achieved greatness of mind. Probably a minute number of teachers have ever so stimulated their students to think for themselves” (communication between Jack Calvin and Richard Astro, 7/4/69). This was certainly true of Dick. Over the intervening thirty years I’ve accumulated all of the significant books about Leopold and Ricketts. 3. Curt Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Robert A. McCabe, Aldo Leopold: The Professor (Madison, Wisc.: Palmer Publications, 1987); Tom Tanner, ed., Aldo Leopold: The Man and His Legacy (Ankeny, Iowa: Soil Conservation Society of America, 1987); J. Baird Callicott, Companion to A Sand County Almanac: Interpretive and Critical Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Susan L. Flader, Thinking like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude toward Deer, Wolves, and Forests (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974). 4. Julianne Lutz Newton, Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey: Rediscovering the Author of A Sand County Almanac (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2006). 5. Astro, Steinbeck and Ricketts; Richard Astro, Edward F. Ricketts, Western Writers Series 21 (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1976). 6. Joel W. Hedgpeth, ed., The Outer Shores, pt. 1: Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck Explore the Pacific Coast; pt. 2: Breaking Through (Eureka , Calif.: Mad River Press, 1978); for “Doc,” see John Steinbeck, Cannery Row (New York: Viking Press, 1945), and Sweet Thursday (New York: Viking Press, 1954). 7. D. Burnor, “Ed Ricketts: From the Tidepools to the Stars,” CoEvolution Quarterly 28 (Winter 1980): 14–21. 8. Katie Rodger, Renaissance Man of Cannery Row: The Life and Letters of Edward F. Ricketts (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, Notes to Pages xv–3 / 165 2002), and Breaking Through: Essays, Journals, and Travelogues of Edward F. Ricketts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 9. Eric Enno Tamm, Beyond the Outer Shores: The Untold Odyssey of Ed Ricketts, the Pioneering Ecologist Who Inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004). 10. Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 71. INTRODUCTION 1. A detailed account of Leopold’s last morning, including a portion of his daughter Estella’s letter to Nina and a map indicating important aspects of the events of the fire, can be found in McCabe, Aldo Leopold: Professor, 142–45. 2. Curt mentioned this fascinating fact while we were eating pizza with Mike, Lisa, and Angus Mossman at a well-known establishment on the square in downtown Baraboo in August 2005, after an afternoon spent at the Shack and visiting Nina. I followed up on a snowy day in December 2007, when my family and I visited the library archives at the University of...