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14 ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY ~ Leopold as Practical Moralist and Pragmatic Policy Analyst Bryan G. Norton Aldo Leopold's ideas and pronouncements on environmental policy, read fifty years after his death, establish how far Leopold was ahead of his-and our own-time. The ideas expressed in these quotations draw upon his experience with a broad spectrum of conservation issues. They demonstrate how Leopold's approach, iffollowed, would immensely improve the process and substance of environmental policy, even today. Although Leopold was not a philosopher, he developed a remarkably complex and subtle "philosophy" of environmental management. He loved to speculate on "big"-or as he often said "general"-ideas, but he was much more than a prophet of a future environmental consciousness . The ideas he lived by were the ideas that were forced upon him by years of thoughtful and painful experience. His discussions of policy often read like briefings he might like to have given to his first boss, the eminently practical Gifford Pinchot. In these discussions Leopold generally eschewed "intangible" ideas, accepting common philosophical and religious commitments as constraints on his speculations; yet he gaveor struggled valiantly to give-carefully articulated reasons and justifications for all of his management precepts. It may be helpful to list some of the ideas, articulated between 1920 and his death in 1948, that establish Leopold's claim to prescience in the area ofmanagement theory and process. First, he insisted-contrary to his contemporaries and in opposition to most oftoday's congressional representatives-that ethics, not economics, ultimately validate environmental policies. Second, in anticipation of the current trend toward public and stakeholder participation in policy process, Leopold expressed his progressivist-populist faith that it must be farmers, sportsmen , and other citizens themselves who accomplish conservation. This second belief led to a third idea, one that is anathema to many environmental managers today, as it was to Leopold's own contemporaries in government resource agencies. He believed that public-servant environmentalists should be just that; that the highest calling of resource man201 202 Part II. Conservation Policy agers was education and public involvement, rather than what he derisively called the "ciphers" of management economics.! Fourth, Leopold recognized before others that management cannot simply be scientific in the sense of applying fixed principles of science; rather, and more important , we should be managing scientifically in the dynamic sense. Leopold thus insisted on policies designed to get results and reduce our ignorance through experiments with real controls. Similarly, today's still-nascent but increasingly important ideas of ecosystem management were given shape by Leopold in his relentless attacks on atomistic management, which separated management of the land into "many separate field forces."2 He advocated instead an integrated approach to the management of resources. To these innovations we could add mention of Leopold's extraordinary concerns for our resource legacy to future Americans and a coherent and reflective concept of "sustainable development." Each ofthese ideas-and there are others-would have qualified Leopold as an important innovator. But the totality of them, and the way in which Leopold used his unparalleled powers of observation to illustrate, sharpen, and weave these points together, mark him as the premier genius in the field. We would do well to listen to him very carefully when we choose actions to alter or "improve" on nature and natural functioning of ecosystems. I regard Leopold the policy analyst, the policy-maker, and the practical moralist as the originator and spiritual father of the flourishing tradition of "adaptive ecosystem management," so ably espoused today by C. S. Holling, Carl Walters, Kai Lee, and others.3 Scientifically, Leopold anticipated the idea of ecological resilience, so prominent in the writings of Holling and the adaptive managers, when he described semiarid countries as "set in a hair-trigger equilibrium."4 He clearly recognized that shortsighted management could render ecological systems and processes vulnerable to collapse. Leopold also anticipated a unifying theoretical idea, which later came to be called "general systems theory," or (in theoretical ecology) "hierarchy theory." Leopold's brilliant insightthat managers and agriculturalists must, to be successful, "think like a mountain"-was not (or at least was not only) a mystical vision.5 It was hard-won wisdom, that: (a) the manager, who observes and manipulates, is a part of the system, and not only views it but changes it from within; and (b) we can understand observed nature more coherently if we see it as a nested hierarchy of subsystems, with larger, slower-moving systems forming...

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