Agrarianism and the Good Society: Land, Culture, Conflict, and Hope

2. A Durable Scale

The conservation community in the United States suffered a loss in April 1948, when sixty-one-year-old Aldo Leopold died fighting a grass fire on a neighbor’s farm. It was a loss not just of a lead conservation voice but of a type of conservationist, one who could roll up his sleeves and labor on land yet who understood the broad cultural and economic contexts of land use and conservation. It was the latter skill that made Leopold so valuable, then and now. Even as he mastered scientific details, he developed a rare ability to distance himself from the day-to-day. He could step back from his surrounding culture, assessing its strengths and weaknesses and identifying why people used and misused land as they did. Leopold had little trouble isolating the root problems that conservation faced. The problems were not chiefly scientific, nor did they admit of technological fixes. Land degradation arose because people used the land wrongly. It would be reversed only if they changed their ways.1 Over the course of his forty-year career, Aldo Leopold took part in pretty much the full range of conservation work: soil protection , forestry, grazing, waterways, wildlife, agriculture. In dealing with the challenges, he necessarily roamed widely among the sciences. He roamed just as widely in his thoughts about the human condition. Leopold could see how important human behavior was and, hence, how important social and economic factors were. Behavior was closely linked with popular values and widespread A DURABLE SCALE 2  26 Agrarianism and the Good Society assumptions about land and the human place. If better public behavior was going to come about, American culture had to change. Upon Leopold’s death, his work was largely taken over by an array of technicians rather than by conservationists of similar breadth. Experts divided nature study and conservation into many parts and then allocated the specific tasks. This specialization was already advanced during Leopold’s day, and he was greatly troubled by it. Scientists were gaining expertise in ever-smaller areas. Few of them were thinking about the landscape in its entirety, with people included. Few could see how the conservation of particular resources—water, grass, timber, wildlife—presented a single challenge rather than multiple challenges. Even fewer recognized how the conservation of land and the conservation of people were intimately linked. The new technicians brought skill to their tasks, but the broader picture was losing focus, and too often the technical parts fit together poorly. Leopold first gained prominence in 1920, when he promoted the then-novel idea of protecting the nation’s remaining wild lands.2 Wild places had survived because no one had gotten around to altering them. Given the rising economic pressures that were bringing automobiles and new roads, legal protection seemed needed to keep them wild. Leopold urged that it take place. Largely through his efforts, the U.S. Forest Service in 1926 designated the nation’s first wilderness, in the Gila National Forest in Arizona. In writings in the 1920s and 1930s, Leopold proceeded to catalog and publicize the reasons that wilderness protection made sense.3 In 1935 he and six others founded the Wilderness Society, with Leopold writing its culturally charged manifesto. Leopold continued promoting wilderness protection after moving, in midcareer, from the Southwest to the more densely occupied farm region of central Wisconsin. He is remembered, justly, as the founder of wilderness protection and as a particularly able advocate for it. Leopold’s initial defense of wilderness focused on the recreational value of roadless areas for visitors who really wanted to get away. The road-building urge was welling up, and roadless areas were disappearing.4 To protect big wilderness, Leopold argued, was to preserve for a hardy minority a type of recreational oppor- 27 A Durable Scale tunity that could not take place elsewhere. To this recreation rationale Leopold soon added the idea of wilderness as wildlife habitat for big game animals whose numbers were declining because of domesticated livestock and expanding settlements. This second rationale was also human centered. More and more people were buying licenses to hunt, and game populations were falling. More game meant better hunting. Before long, Leopold’s thinking about wildlife expanded beyond game species. Wilderness areas were also good refuges for nongame species, particularly animals that had trouble living near people. Even predator protection entered the picture, in...