Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold (January 11, 1887 – April 21, 1948)

Aldo Leopold was a pioneering scientist in the fields of forestry, soil conservation, wildlife management, and wilderness preservation. He is best known today for his still-influential book A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. According to Robert Finch, “No other single book of American nature writing – with the exception of Walden – has achieved such lasting stature as A Sand County Almanac. Since it was first published by Oxford in 1949, one year after the author’s death, it has become an established classic in the field, admired by an ever-growing number of readers, imitated by hundreds of writers, and providing the core for modern conservation ethics.” Testimony to its modern relevance is given by noted novelist and essayist Barbara Kingsolver, who in an Introduction written in 2020 commented that A Sand County Almanac” was one of a handful of books that she rereads at least once every decade. The book remains a highly accessible meditation that can hep rural and urban people with widely different atttitudes towared nature find common ground. This book is mandatory reading for all planet patriots!

He was an original thinker helping to take conservation to new heights.

Aldo Leopold’s seminal essays about “Thinking Like a Mountain,” and the Land Ethic” has been conceived as a turning point in conservation philosophy. He wrote, “we abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong,we may begin to use it with love and respect… A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

Read “The Land Ethic” by Aldo Leopold here (PDF)

Leopold was a co-founder of The Wilderness Society.

Leopold as Part of the “Wisconsin Conservation Triumvirate”

Leopold held both a Muir-like appreciation of nature, but also a Pinchot-like intent to use nature wisely.

Leopold copied down a quote from Muir that was to pre-sage Leopold’s eventually-adopted view that all wildlife – even predators like wolves, bears, and snakes – had value: “Poor creatures, loved only by their Maker, they are timid and bashful, as mountaineers know; and though perhaps not possessed of much of that charity that suffers long and is kind, seldom, either by mistake or by mishap, do harm to any one…. Again and again, in season and out of season, the question comes up, “What are rattlesnakes good for?” As if anything that does not obviously make the benefit of man had any right to exist; as if our ways were God’s ways.”

In A Sand County Almanac, Leopold mentions John Muir’s Wisconsin experiences, and, like Muir, decries the loss of the now-extinct Passenger Pigeon.

As a university professor, Leopold recommended students read Muir’s The Story of My Boyhood and Youth due to its evocative descriptions of frontier Wisconsin. Noting that the Muir farm has become depleted floristically and otherwise, he nonetheless suggested that Muir’s frontier farm of his boyhood be made a state park. Today, much of Muir’s boyhood home at Fountain Lake is a 125 acre county park, a national historic landmark, Native vegetation is being restored, and the adjacent Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources land surrounding Ennis Lake (which the Muir family called “Fountain Lake”) includes a trail that circles the lake and passes through 7 different habitats.

Aldo Leopold is sometimes considered part of a historic conservation triumvirate coming out of Wisconsin, humorously expressed by the newspaper The Capital Times on March 26, 1990 in an essay for the 20th anniversary of Earth Day: “In the beginning there was John Muir, who begat Aldo Leopold, who begat Gaylord Nelson, who begat Earth Day.”

Sculptor James Muir was so inspired by the idea of the “Wisconsin conservation triumvirate” that he created a sculpture entitled “the Begats” which portrays Muir, Leopold, and Nelson in discussion together.

For an analysis of Wisconsin’s “environmental triumvirate,” see Three Degrees of Separation: Wisconsin’s Environmental Legacy by Michael Edmonds, in the Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 100, number 4, summer 2017. (Interestingly, due to newspapers not keeping their archived articles online, Edmonds credits this quote to the John Muir Exhibit website, whereas that site clearly credits the original quotation being published by an unknown author in The Capital Times back in 1990.)

For an engaging illustrated essay from a geographic / travel viewpoint, see History On The Road: John Muir and Aldo Leopold in Wisconsin by Thomas J. Straka and James G. Lewis in Forest History Today (Spring/Fall 2015).

The postage stamp from the Pacific island nation of Palau came from that country’s 1999 special stamp collection featuring “Environmental Heroes of the 20th Century.” In addition to Aldo Leopold, this panel of stamps also featured Rachel Carson, Ding Darling, David Brower, Jacques Cousteau, Roger Peterson, Prince Philip, Joseph Krutch, Diane Fosse, Al Gore, David Attenborough, Paul McCready, Sting, Paul Winter, Ian MacHarg and Earth Day founder Denis Hayes.

This special event cover by “Coverscape” celebrates the founding of The Wilderness Society on January 21, 1935, and is postmarked 80 years later on January 21, 2015. It acknowledges Aldo Leopold as a co-founder, along with Bob Marshall,Benton MacKaye, and others. The Society continues to advocate for the protection of wilderness areas in the Unite States, and was at the forefront in the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act which protects millions of acres of wild landscapes.

Favorite Quotes

“The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only those who know the most about it can appreciation how little we know about it. The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, 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.”

“It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.”

“Quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

“[A] land ethic changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.”

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

“A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.”

“It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense.”

“Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”

“This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers. Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it—a vast pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.”

The last Passenger Pigeon, Martha, in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Just 100 years earlier, this was the most abundant bird in the world. In 1914 this species officially went extinct. Below are some excerpts from what Aldo Leopold had to say when dedicating a monument to this magnificent bird in a Wisconsin state park (an essay later published in A Sand County Almanac, 1949):

“We have erected a monument to commemorate the funeral of a species. It symbolizes our sorrow. We grieve because no living man will see again the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds, sweeping a path for spring across the March skies, chasing the defeated winter from all the woods and prairies of Wisconsin.

Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons. Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know…

It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise…

Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark…These things, I say, should have come to us. I fear they have not come to many.

Today the oaks still flaunt their burden at the sky, but the feathered lightning is no more. Worm and weevil must now perform slowly and silently the biological task that once drew thunder from the firmament.”

Aldo Leopold

Leopold as Part of the “Wisconsin Conservation Triumvirate”

Favorite Quotes

Further Reading