Global Bioethics: Building on the Leopold Legacy

Appendix I. THE LEOPOLD HERITAGE

---Appendix 1--THE LEOPOLD HERITAGE ALDO LEOPOLD was born on January 11, 1887, in Burlington, Iowa, where his father and grandfathers were prominent citizens. He did graduate work and obtained a master's degree in forestry at the Yale Forest School (where the great conservationist Gifford Pinchot was a professor) in June 1909. He entered the U.S. Forest Service at once and was sent to the new Southwestern District in Arizona and New Mexico. By 1912 Leopold was supervisor of the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico, "a million acres supporting 200,000 sheep, 7000 head of cattle, 600 homesteads and a billion feet of lumber ."l In April 1913, in a remote area, he was almost fatally exposed to wet and cold conditions and required eighteen months for recuperation, during which time Flader notes that he may have read the eleven-volume Riverside edition of Thoreau's works, which he had received in 1912 as a wedding gift (Flader, 10). With the publication in 1933 of his successful 185 186 GLOBAL BIOETHICS text Game Management,2 Leopold could indulge in "a reorientation in his thinking from a historical and recreational to a predominantly ecological and ethical justification for wilderness" (Flader, 29). In April 1935 Leopold acquired the worn-out, abandoned farm ("the shack") on the Wisconsin River that was to become the setting for most of the nature sketches in A Sand County Almanac; here he wrote most of the essays that constitute "The Land Ethic," which, according to Meine,3 was composed in four phases over a period of fourteen years. This remarkable essay has become the subject of countless articles ; indeed, Meine has noted that Leopold was cited in 27 of 96 articles in the first eighteen issues of Environmental Ethics, which was founded in 1979. Quoting Flader, "On April 21, 1948 Aldo Leopold died of a heart attack while helping his neighbors fight a grass fire that threatened his sandcounty farm. One week earlier, the book of essays for which he had been seeking a publisher since early 1941 was accepted by Oxford University Press" (35). His son Luna edited the manuscript and saw it through to publication in 1949. THE LEOPOLD FAMILY HERITAGE Aldo Leopold was fortunate in his cultural and biological heritage. The record contains abundant material on his German ancestors, all meticulously assembled by Meine in his monumental biography of Leopold.4 His paternal grandfather, Charles J. J. Leopold, was born in Hanover in 1809, while his maternal grandfather, Charles Starker, was born in 1826 in Stuttgart. Aldo's father, Carl, was born in Burlington, Iowa, in 1858 and grew up with a lifelong interest in hunting, which he passed on to his son, along with "something of the family's Building on the Leopold Legacy 187 aristocratic bearing, but without its aristocratic affectations" (8). Carl's parents had continued to receive newspapers from the capitals of Europe. Aldo's mother, Clara Starker, had traveled with her parents in Europe, where she developed a deep love of grand opera. Years later she made an annual pilgrimage to the opera in Chicago. Clara Starker was Carl Leopold's cousin, inasmuch as their fathers had married sisters (Thusneld Runge Leopold and Marie Runge Starker). Their families were closely intertwined, and German remained the household language until the children enrolled in school. Meine describes in detail the combination of the love of hunting and the love of nature that Aldo received from his father. At the same time, his mother 's influence was to emphasize education and writing . She was responsible for his leaving home to attend the Laurenceville Preparatory School at the age of seventeen. At the same time she began the correspondence between them. Both parents wrote frequently, while Aldo fired off letters "at a rate that sometimes reached four and five letters a week" and that continued until long after Leopold's college days (34). All of these letters were saved and available to Meine, who noted that the letters allowed Leopold to explore and express his absorbing relationship with nature, all the while refining the skills that would one day produce some of the language's most eloquent nature writing. Thus, the combination of a warm and supportive family and perhaps an inborn urge to write provided Leopold with a heritage that sustained him throughout his productive life. Aldo Leopold was fortunate not only in the heritage he...