Aldo Leopold : A Fierce Green Fire

Marybeth Lorbiecki is the author of numerous books and articles about environmental issues, including the John Burroughs Nature Award-winning biography of Aldo Leopold for children, Of Things Natural, Wild, and Free.

Introduction

Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.

--Foreword to A Sand County Almanac

For those of us who have often read A Sand County Almanac, these words are as familiar and beloved as our backpacks, canoes, and walking sticks. They evoke that other world in which we shake off the burdens of overstuffed calendars, eye-straining computers, bleeping answering machines, dull textbooks, and traffic. The words urge us to rethink who we are and how we are living.
For those who have not read the Almanac, nor heard of Aldo Leopold, his words may sound like those of a contemporary environmentalist. They should. Though Leopold died in 1948, his writings, research, and teaching have formed the framework of discussions about land use for more than half a decade.
Leopold is internationally recognized as the father of modern wildlife management and ecology and the chair of the field's first university department. His textbook, Game Management, was the definitive text for decades; it has been recently reprinted. As for A Sand County Almanac, Leopold's book of personal essays, it has sold over a million copies and has been translated into German, French, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese. It has been dubbed "the environmentalists' bible," and Leopold has been hailed as an American prophet.
Leopold's influence, however, goes far beyond the Almanac and 0Game Management. More than five hundred of his essays, articles, handbooks, reviews, and newsletters were published in his lifetime, and nearly as many remain unpublished or are currently under consideration for publication (not including his letters and journals). He was a member of more than a hundred clubs and societies, many of which continue to follow the course Leopold set. The first wilderness area in a national forest, and thus beginning of our wilderness system, was also the work of Leopold.
It's hard to say what American landscape might look like if Aldo Leopold hadn't come along when he did. His discoveries and policy recommendations drove forward the emerging fields of forestry, soil conservation, wildlife study and management, ecology, wilderness protection, land restoration, and environmental ethics.
Yet how many Americans have ever heard of Leopold?
Relatively few. Perhaps he was involved in too many aspects of the conservation movement to be pigeonholed into an easily remembered historical slot. Perhaps he has not joined Thoreau in American folk history because his writings challenge cultural rather than just individual assumptions: he wrote that "to change ideas about what land is for is to change ideas about what anything is for."
Whatever the reason, the majority of Americans have not yet been introduced to this person who has been so influential in their lives. Even many Almanac devotees know little about how Leopold's thinking evolved, or about his life. This is a shame; it is a life well worth knowing.
Leopold wasn't born inspired, and he didn't achieve a long string of school degrees. He followed his curiosity, made mistakes, and ate his words more than once. He summed up for many the questions, the conflicts, and the longings of an ecological approach to life.
Aldo Leopold's greatest dream was to learn how to live on the land without spoiling it. In his life and writings, he came closer than most of us will ever come. That is, unless we too let the land settle into our bones.