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

Preface

xiii A broad interdisciplinary approach is to be expected from ecologists , who take the relationships among all things as a first principle . No relationship, no matter how tenuous it appears, is too inappropriate for exploration.1 Specialization is the fashion of the day, however, and it may be the style of most human thinking for all time. That is, considering human brain architecture, it may be easier for our minds to work within the confines of defined units, or silos in the modern parlance, than it is for us to make broad cross-topic comparisons. I find it necessary, at times, to lean on heroes, and two of my longtime heroes are the early ecologists Aldo Leopold and Ed Ricketts. When I’m off center, or maybe just want to relax, I turn to these men. Not only have I read everything they have published, but I have also read everything I know to have been published about them. I have visited their shacks and have gotten to know their primary scholars—Leopold and Ricketts are men who have stood, and can stand, a lot of study.2 And I have noticed that even PREFACE xiv / Preface though they were contemporaries, and even though they contributed mightily toward molding the field of observational natural history into the scientific discipline of ecology, there is no single place in any of the works by or about Leopold or Ricketts where the other is mentioned. While I suspect that both Leopold and Ricketts would have been appalled to learn this, they have become silos—big enough and important enough to be self-contained. The stories of Leopold and Ricketts are, indeed, interesting and important told separately—they were amazingly gifted human beings. Works on Leopold include Curt Meine’s 1988 biography Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; Bob McCabe’s 1987 Aldo Leopold: The Professor; Tom Tanner’s 1987 collection of essays, Aldo Leopold: The Man and His Legacy; J. Baird Callicott’s 1987 collection Companion to A Sand County Almanac: Interpretive and Critical Essays; and Susan Flader’s 1974 Thinking like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude toward Deer, Wolves, and Forests.3 New books about Leopold, such as Julianne Lutz Newton’s Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey, appear on a regular basis.4 Ed Ricketts has had his own admirers. In 1973, Richard Astro published John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist, and in 1976 Astro wrote Edward F. Ricketts as part of Boise State University’s Western Writers Series.5 Joel Hedgpeth ’s two-volume set The Outer Shores, published in 1978, pulled together edited versions of Ricketts’s unpublished papers and offered an objective, firsthand look at the man (as opposed to the “Doc” of John Steinbeck’s legend).6 Hedgpeth knew Ricketts both personally and professionally, and provides an account that is fresh and honest. Hedgpeth’s volumes were covered in an article in the Whole Earth Catalog’s literary magazine CoEvolu- Preface / xv tion Quarterly.7 Recently, Katie Rodger, working closely with Ed Ricketts Jr. and the Ricketts family, published two extraordinary volumes of original Ricketts material: her 2002 Renaissance Man of Cannery Row: The Life and Letters of Edward F. Ricketts and her 2006 Breaking Through: Essays, Journals, and Travelogues of Edward F. Ricketts (with Ricketts listed as posthumous coauthor).8 In 2004, Eric Enno Tamm published his enthusiastic and insightful Beyond the Outer Shores: The Untold Odyssey of Ed Ricketts, the Pioneering Ecologist Who Inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell.9 Considering these men today, I am struck that playing one off the other might give us, now, a better sense of what it was like to be them, then—at a point in time when the new discipline of ecology was emerging from the older field of natural history, and when advances in ecological theory were being driven by natural history observations. Viewing Leopold and Ricketts simultaneously makes it easier to understand these men in terms of their setting—what Michael Lewis has called “the accomplishments of men in combination with their circumstances.”10 By telling their stories together, comparing and contrasting, a different picture emerges from those presented in the works by or about either man, and we gain a different perspective. In fact, as I hope to show, we gain a perspective...