Aldo Leopold, wilderness advocate and author of the most influential book on conservation, was born in 1887, grew up in Iowa near the bluffs of the Mississippi River, and was captivated by the land from the beginning. He attended Yale Forestry School—the hotbed of conservation at the time—and after graduation joined the newly-minted Forest Service. Assigned to the Southwest, he rose quickly in the agency, writing many scientific and philosophical articles and earning appointment as a ranger.
Leopold saw the development that was coming on strong and became a committed advocate for wilderness—“Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?” In 1924 he made conservation history by spearheading the Forest Service’s designation of 500,000 acres of federal land as the Gila Wilderness Area in New Mexico. It was the first time that any government in the world had ever designated land as wilderness (this led to the Wilderness Act of 1964, the first legislative declaration of wilderness in history).
In 1928 Leopold left government service and joined the University of Wisconsin faculty, where he was named to the new chair in game management. He wrote hundreds of scholarly articles, always on the land, water, wildlife, and wilderness. He and seven other leading conservationists founded the Wilderness Society in 1935. In the same year, the family purchased a run-down farm on the Wisconsin River that the Leopolds brought back to life. The farm inspired Leopold’s surpassingly great book, A Sand County Almanac.
In it, he put down some of the most memorable passages in all of American literature. He wrote of a visit in the 1920s to the “green lagoons” at the mouth of the Colorado River, across the international line in Mexico. “A verdant wall of mesquite and willow separated the channel from the thorny desert beyond.” He described the lush vegetation and animals of all sorts, among them egrets, cormorants, mallards and teal, bobcats, coyotes, and raccoons—and, most of all, “the despot of the Delta, the great jaguar, el tigre.” He continued:
“We saw neither hide nor hair of him, but his personality pervaded the wilderness; no living beast forgot his potential presence, for the price of unwariness was death. No deer rounded a bush, or stopped to nibble pods under a mesquite tree, with out a premonitory sniff for el tigre. No campfire died without talk of him. No dog curled up for the night, save at his master’s feet; he needed no telling that the king of cats still ruled the night; that those massive jaws could fell an ox, those jaws shear off bones like a guillotine.”
But Leopold was writing in the 1940s, a generation after that visit, and he knew that the wilderness—and el tigre—were no more. “By this time the Delta has probably been made safe for cows, and forever dull for adventuring hunters. Freedom from fear has arrived, but a glory has departed from the green lagoons.”
Leopold also mourned the loss of wildness in a passage called “Thinking like a Mountain.” Wolves announced their presence when “A deep chesty howl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far darkness of the night. It is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow, and of contempt for all the adversities of the world.” “Only the mountain,” he wrote, “has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.” Leopold was a hunter, an ethical one, and his ethic grew much deeper the day he shot an aged female wolf on the slope of the mountain:
“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have know ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”
In A Sand Country Almanac, Leopold announced the “land ethic” that has been so influential in causing millions of readers in America and around the world to understand the relationship of our species to the land. A powerfully written book drawing upon “The Green Lagoons,” “Thinking Like a Mountain,” and many other personal and profound experiences in nature, it deserves multiple readings by all who care for, and worry about, the land.
Leopold’s land ethic is at once sweeping and general, layered and nuanced, cautionary and uplifting. It is founded on ecology: “Land… is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals”; the role of Homo sapiens is not “the conqueror of the land-community” but rather being “a plain member and citizen of it.” The land ethic abhors species extinctions and honors species diversity: “The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces.” It is demanding: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the land. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” And a land ethic cannot be only an idea of the mind: It must be lived, “for nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written'.”
America’s Top 10 Conservation Heroes is a series honoring the individuals and organizations that have made the biggest mark on conservation, environmental protection, and awareness of the outdoors. The series is written by Charles Wilkinson, Distinguished Professor at the University of Colorado and author of fourteen books on law, history, and society in the American West.
America’s Top 10 Conservation Heroes
1. Theodore Roosevelt
2. John Muir
3. Rachel Carson
4. Stewart Udall
5. Aldo Leopold
6. Ansel Adams
7. Earthjustice
8. Henry David Thoreau
9. Edward Abbey
10. Bruce Babbitt