The Aldo Leopold Legacy

The Michigan Wildlife Conservancy will host an unique workshop—the Leopold Education Project—on September 19, 2009.  It will be based on the classic writings of the “father of wildlife ecology,” Aldo Leopold.  This article highlights the teachings of the forester/wildlife manager turned educator, who still inspires 60 years after his death.  

Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) is best known for his book, A Sand County Almanac, hailed as one of the most influential nature/environment writings in history.  It changed the thinking of those who already called themselves conservationists, and made conservationists out of others.  A collection of essays, the book blended environmental awareness and biology while inspiring a land use ethic based on principles that have withstood the test of time.  Leopold’s observations and descriptions in those poetic pages are perhaps even more relevant today than when written prior to the end of World War II.  

But Aldo Leopold’s legacy reaches far beyond A Sand County Almanac.  As a professor at the University of Wisconsin from 1928 to 1948, Leopold influenced thousands of students including many who went on to long careers in natural resources management and academia.  He wrote Game Management in 1933, a work that for the first time integrated varied disciplines—from zoology, biology and forestry to economics—into what we now collectively consider as “wildlife ecology.”  Leopold educated the general public as well as professionals about conservation principles essential to sound decision-making.  He wanted people to see both the “little picture” and the “big picture.”  

Aldo Leopold grew up in Iowa where he hiked and hunted along the Mississippi River Valley with his father.  A self-taught naturalist, he majored in forestry at Yale University.  After graduation in 1909, he took a job with the U.S. Forest Service which sent him to Arizona and New Mexico where he did mostly survey work.  Occasionally, Leopold forwarded proposals to his bosses to create game refuges or otherwise protect wildlife and plant communities.  But his ideas were usually quickly dismissed as outside the realm of forestry.  

After World War I, Leopold’s duties grew to overseeing all forest land in the Southwest United States.  He started to question widespread clear-cutting (as it was then practiced), became concerned with soil erosion, and wondered (loudly) about the virtues of fire suppression and predator control.  He saw value in natural processes—expressing concerns and attitudes not in vogue within the forestry profession of the time.  

In 1924 the Forest Service transferred Leopold to a desk job at its Forest Products Laboratory in Wisconsin.  The job did not suit him, to say the least, and he quit four years later.  He started teaching at the University of Wisconsin and supplemented his income as a game and forestry consultant.  And he started writing.  

After publishing Game Management, Leopold became first president of the newly-founded Wilderness Society in 1935.  His essays caught the attention of a publisher.  In 1944, he submitted 13 essays, but they were rejected.  He tried again after re-writing them to include more anecdotes and they eventually became A Sand County Almanac.  

Leopold was a pioneer.  Under his leadership, the University of Wisconsin created a Department of Game Management, and appointed Aldo Leopold as its first chair.  The University made the first attempt to correct disturbed lands in a systematic fashion, starting the science of ecological restoration under Leopold’s direction on abandoned farmland.  He championed wise land use long before it became politically correct, providing timeless advice.  

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Aldo Leopold was that his position was not one of environment over the individual.  In that sense, he was certainly no radical or extremist.  Rather, Leopold’s land use ethic stemmed from a desire to bring humans in closer contact with their environment.  

In his introduction to the 2001 illustrated edition of A Sand County Almanac, Kenneth Brower wrote, “Leopold understood before anyone that the century or two of the Preservation Era will prove to be a prologue, an introductory chapter, noble but brief.  Almost all the wilderness that can be saved has been saved.  For the duration of our time on the planet—for whatever piece of eternity we have left here—restoration will be the great task.”  

The Michigan Wildlife Conservancy was founded twenty-seven years ago on that concept.  Our organization has been a leader in restoration of habitats, and it is indeed a great task.  But it is one made easier by guiding principles provided more than 60 years ago.  

Dr. Patrick J. Rusz
Director of Wildlife Programs

Five Quotes From Aldo Leopold That Have Helped Guide the Michigan Wildlife Conservancy --  

“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.  For those who cannot the choice is clear.”  

“There is a clear tendency in American conservation to relegate to government all necessary jobs that private landowners fail to perform.  Government ownership, operation, subsidy, or regulation is now widely prevalent in forestry, range management, soil and watershed management, park and wilderness conservation, fisheries management, and migratory bird management, with more to come.  Most of this growth in governmental conservation is proper and logical, some of it is inevitable.  That I imply no disapproval of it is implicit in the fact that I have spent most of my life working for it.  Nevertheless the question arises: What is the ultimate magnitude of the enterprise?  Will the tax base carry its eventual ramification?  At what point will governmental conservation, like the mastodon, become handicapped by its own dimensions?  The answer, if there is any, seems to be in a land ethic, or some other force which assigns more obligation to the private landowner.”   

“The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively, the land.”  

“Obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extensions of the social conscience from people to land.”  

"One cannot love game and hate predators.”

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