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Aldo Leopold

Broadcast on April 7, 2011

Photo courtesy of the Aldo Leopold Foundation - www.aldoleopold.org

Photo courtesy of the Aldo Leopold Foundation - www.aldoleopold.org

By Megan Wilde and Melissa Brady

The land was in ruins. To most buyers, even eight dollars an acre was too high a price for the worn-out Wisconsin farm with its rickety old chicken shack. Once covered in forest, it had been logged, burned, and overgrazed. But in 1935, Aldo Leopold bought the barren scrap of earth. And he cultivated a relationship with it that would ultimately earn him a place alongside Henry David Thoreau in history. Who was this man? And how did he revolutionize our thinking about the natural world?

Leopold and his family turned the chicken shack into a cozy weekend retreat and spent the next several years restoring the land around it. Eventually they planted some 40,000 trees and transformed the bleak landscape into a thriving patchwork of forest and prairie.

The seeds for this restoration project had actually been sown in Iowa. Born in 1887, Leopold spent his youth there traipsing through wilderness, observing and admiring the natural world. Those experiences led him to Yale University’s forestry school and a U.S. Forest Service career in Arizona and New Mexico. In 1933, he published the first textbook on wildlife management and became chair of the nation’s first game-management program at the University of Wisconsin.

Because of such accomplishments, Leopold has been called the father of wildlife management. But the ideas he cultivated during this career, and while restoring the Wisconsin farm, became an even greater legacy.

Leopold laid out his philosophy in a collection of essays, written over 12 years and published in 1949 as A Sand County Almanac. In it, he chronicled his observations of the natural world and reflects on humanity’s relationship with it. He wrote, for example, of hunting wolves many years before:

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then… 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.”

Through his essays, Leopold described the natural world as a community of which we humans are a part, a community in which soils, water, plants, and animals all play important roles. He asserted that we have an ethical obligation to protect this natural community.

“Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. By land is meant all of the things on, over, or in the earth. Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges… The land is one organism… If the biota, in the course of eons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

These were groundbreaking concepts. A Sand County Almanac eventually sold two-million copies and helped lay the foundation for the modern-day environmental movement. But Leopold never witnessed his book’s success.

The year before it was published, he had a heart attack while fighting a fire on a neighbor’s farm. Though his life was extinguished, Leopold’s own fierce, green fire still burns—in his writings, in the conservation projects he inspired, and in all people who live in harmony with the land he loved.

Have a question or comment about this episode? Contact Nature Notes Coordinator Megan Wilde at mwilde [at] cdri [dot] org. Or discuss this episode on Nature Notes’ Facebook page.

References & Resources for Educators

• Aldo Leopold Foundation
• Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for our Time: documentary about Leopold’s life and career

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