By Nathan Reinhold
Aldo Leopold was an American ecologist, forester, environmentalist, and author. He was born January 11th, 1887 according to the Aldo Leopold Foundation. Leopold is credited with being the “father of wildlife management” (ALF, n.d.). He graduated from the Yale Forest School in 1909 and started a career in forestry, which eventually brought him to Baraboo, Wisconsin. It was at a nearby farm where he would write his famous book A Sand County Almanac. He went through a philosophical transformation during the time he lived on this farm that would shape his influential beliefs. He loved the natural world and he saw the protection and preservation of the environment as a philosophical dilemma.
In A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949, Leopold collected a series of essays on conservation, which “set the stage for the modern conservation movement” (ALF). “In 1935, Leopold bought an abandoned farm in the sand counties along the Wisconsin River near Baraboo” (Frese, 2003). There he would write his essays on his philosophies and his nature observations as he and his family brought the dilapidated farm back to health (Frese, 2003). It was through his observation of geese during this time that started to change his beliefs from an appreciation of nature through a somewhat arrogant consumption to identification with nature and responsible participation (McCoy, n.d.). He learned to identify with geese as social animals that grieve over family members killed by hunters (McCoy, n.d.). After hunting and killing a mother wolf, he watched her life leave her eyes as her cubs limped away. A turning point in his life, he now saw that hunting and other reckless human behavior “disrupts the flow of an entire system of life” (McCoy, n.d.). Humans are only one part of a great natural cycle of symbiotic influence and interdependence (McCoy, n.d.). The almanac contained his concept of the “land ethic.” According to Leopold the land ethic states, “the individual [person] is a member of an [ecological] community of interdependent parts” (Leopold, 1966).
On April 21, 1948 while fighting a brush fire on neighbor’s farm in order to protect his own home, Aldo Leopold died from a heart attack (ALF, n.d.). At the very beginning of the Foreword to A Sand County Almanac, he wrote that there are “some who can live without wild tings, and some who cannot” (Leopold, 1966). The reality of Leopold’s writings and of the environmental movements he inspired is that none of us can live without the “wild things” of an interdependent global ecosystem. More than half a century after his death, his legacy of environmental ethics is even more important.
References
Leopold, A. (1966). A sand county almanac. New York: Oxford University Press.
Frese, S. J. (November 2003). Aldo Leopold: An American prophet. The History Teacher (Long Beach, Calif.), 37(1), 99-118.
McCoy, A. (n.d.). The transformation of Aldo Leopold. Retrieved April 1, 2007, from the Yale University Website: http://pantheon.cis.yale.edu/~thomast/essays/amy/
The Aldo Leopold Foundation. (n.d.). Aldo Leopold. Retrieved March 30, 2007, from http://www.aldoleopold.org
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1 comment:
Thank you. I found Mr. Leopold's words quite touching. In fact, he is an ecologist after my own heart, someone who comes to awareness through the visceral feeling of the right and wrong of things.
Your piece was well written, too.
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