For Love of the World: Essays on Nature Writers

Aldo Leopold's Counter-Friction

AIdo Leopold's Counter-Friction Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. -Leopold, to his students The centenary of AIdo Leopold's birth has given "the most significant conservationist of the last seventy years" (Stephen Fox, on the dustjacket of Curt Meine's Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work) more than usual notice and added substantially to the scholarship concerning his life and thought. Meine's book is the first biography, which is to say a fuller account of the life and, accordingly, a somewhat less-focused, issue-oriented study than Susan Flader's Thinking Like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude toward Deer, Wolves and Forests (1974), the first major study and the first to make use of the extensive Leopold Archive, and still the most incisive and best written. Meine's book, some 650 closely packed and heavily documented pages, is more than twice the size of all the commemorative publications , chiefly the Companion to A Sand County Almanac, edited by J. Baird Callicott, and Aldo Leopold: The Man and His Legacy, edited by Thomas Tanner . The first collection brings together some of the best early essays on Leopold as well as newer work; the second gathers some of the proceedings of a week54 long celebration at Iowa State University (which recently announced a recommendation to phase out "environmental studies because of waning interest"). Inevitably, given the handful of Leopold scholars, the collections overlap. Worthy of mention also is the handsome "Special Commemorative Edition" of A Sand County Almanac (Oxford University Press), special, I think, because Robert Finch supplies an excellent introduction guided by his concern, as a nature writer, with the poetic understanding of nature and by his literary sense of how Leopold figures in his book. All of this work, much of it academic, acknowledges the environmental crisis, which ~ore than ever before has awakened interest in nature writing (or, better, ecological writing)-writing, according to Barry Lopez , that will "not only one day produce a major and lasting body of American literature, but . . . provide the foundation for a reorganization of American political thought." Meine has done large and valuable work, and the wealth of detail in his biography may be said to compensate for its defects. Leopold, in his sometimes folksy way and from pride in outdoor cooking, would have noted both the plentiful raisins and lumpy pudding. For style, in every sense but especially in respect to focus and felicity, is lacking. As with many recent biographies, data not portraiture is primary, and the reader who wants the "life" must do most of the "graphing." Meine has done more than anyone to fully document Leopold's family background, childhood, education (at Burlington High School, Lawrenceville Preparatory School, and Yale), early career as a forester in New Mexico and Arizona, and courtship of and marriage to Estella Bergere (of a wealthy, long-established New Mexican family). Much of this is recovered in Leopold's letters, and some of it is told on a daily basis. He sees the importance of Leopold 's birth in Burlington, Iowa, in 1887, for Burlington was a portal to the West, to the frontier whose closing Frederick Jackson Turner would soon announce , and he is aware of the fact that Leopold's life intersects history, that at birth he was given the issues of economic and industrial expansion and wasteful land use that confronted him (and that he confronted) for the rest of his life. He knows the history of conservation, which he uses, as had both Susan Flader and Stephen Fox (his John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement is Meine's model), to provide the context in which Leopold's life and the transformation of his thought from Pinchot's narrow economic managerial to all-encompassing ecological views took place. But his grasp of psychological matters is not comparable. He has none of the skills of a psychohistorian (trained, say, by Erik Erikson) and fails to open the foundational material, to Aida Leopold's Counter-Friction ~ 55 probe what most needs probing, how Leopold in his deepest being was "called" to the vocation (the true calling) of naturalist. The boy who, at Lawrenceville, was known as "the naturalist," which is to say by some standards seemed odd, needs explaining, and crucial episodes, such as his...