AbstractSince its publication in 1949, Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, especially “The Land Ethic” essay, has been influen-tial in conservation and environmental circles. In this wide-ranging but limited review, I discussed Leopold’s life and work, including the important concepts he had written about, and briefly survey the secondary literature he inspired in the realms of science, environmental history, environmental ethics, and ecocriticism.
Keywords Aldo Leopold · A Sand County Almanac · Land ethic · Conservation · Environmental history · Environmental ethics
1 Introduction
In 1946 American conservationist Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) wrote a national program for conservation for the National Education Committee for a New Party organ-ized under A. Philip Randolph and John Dewey (Kersten 2007, pp. 75–76; Meine 2010, pp. 480–481). He proposed two concepts and explained its significance:
The first is that the average citizen, especially the land-owner, has an obligation to manage his land in the interest of the community, as well as in his own interest. The fallacious doctrine that the government must subsi-dize all conservation not immediately profitable for the private landowner will ultimately bankrupt either the treasury, or the land, or both. The nation needs and has a right to expect, the private landowner to use his land with foresight, skill, and regard for the future.
The second concept is that the health of the land as a whole, rather than the supply of its constituent “resources,” is what needs conserving. Land, like other things, has the capacity for self-renewal (i.e., for permanent productivity) only when its natural parts are present, and functional. It is a dangerous fallacy
to assume that we are free to discard or change any part of the land we do not find “useful” (such as flood plains, marshes, and wild floras, and faunas). Too violent modification of the natural order has repeat-edly disorganized the land’s capacity for self-renewal. Floods, erosion, dustbowls, and pests are not only evils in themselves, but symptoms of such disorganization.
Conservation education does not, as yet, deal with these basic concepts of harmony between land use and land health. It must do so if we are to achieve a stable land economy (Leopold 1946a).
These ideas were a culmination of Leopold’s lifelong experi-ence in conservation and his conviction of the civilizational importance of achieving “a stable land economy.” When he wrote this one-page program Leopold was also drafting essays for a manuscript, communicating the same ideas in a more poignant and reflective way. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There1 (Leopold 1949, hereafter referred to as ASCA) was published posthumously and became a classic in Western discourse on the relationship between humans and the rest of the environment, and its impact has been felt glob-ally and cross-culturally. On the occasion of the 70th anni-versary of ASCA, I review the life and work of Leopold and scholarship of his ideas, following in the footsteps of previ-ous reviews (e.g., Flader 1987a, 2011; Freyfogle 2000, 2009; Gibbons 1981; Waller and Flader 2010; Warren 2016). Given the extensive scholarly literature on Leopold, my review will
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necessarily be incomplete. I will describe the main contours of Leopold’s life–work and the scholarship that it inspired.
The breadth of Leopold’s conservation work and volu-minous writings resulted in his wide-ranging influence on ecology and environmental-related subdisciplines, most of which were developed in the wake of the environmental movement during the 1960s and 1970s in the USA. Each subdiscipline tends to focus on the most relevant aspects of Leopold’s thinking. To environmental philosophers and lay readers, Leopold is best known for articulating the idea of a land ethic in “The Land Ethic” essay in ASCA. To most people in this group, the essence of Leopold’s land ethic is expressed in a commonly cited statement (usually referred to by philosopher J. Baird Callicott as the “summary moral maxim”), which occurs as the last two sentences in the fol-lowing paragraph:
The ‘key-log’ which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is eco-nomically 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. (Leopold 1949, pp. 224–225)
The paragraph highlights the fact that Leopold wrote the commonly cited statement while discussing how society can develop a land ethic. Therefore, the statement contains only some of the substance of Leopold’s land-ethical concept.2
The figurative key-log which must be moved to achieve a comprehensive understanding of Leopold is to appreciate his work and writings beyond the commonly cited statement, and understand the social, cultural, and economic context of his life and his character. Leopold’s greatest asset was his independence, which enabled him to build interdependent relationships, keep an open mind, and develop new ideas as the need arose; furthermore “he did not adopt anyone’s phi-losophy outright” (Meine 2010, pp. 33–83, 214). The literal key-log is a reminder that Leopold lived close to the land throughout his life and began his career in forestry.
2 Life and work
2.1 Early life and education
Rand Aldo Leopold was born on January 11, 1887, in Burl-ington, Iowa, into a well-to-do family of Germanic descent.3
His father Carl Leopold ran a successful office furniture busi-ness and was an avid outdoorsman and hunter who observed a conscientious sportsmanship ethic. Leopold developed an early passion for the outdoors and hunting that continued for the rest of his life and left an indelible impression on him: “my earliest impressions of wildlife and its pursuit retain a vivid sharpness of form, color, and atmosphere that half a century of professional wildlife experience has failed to obliterate or to improve upon” (1949, p. 120; Meine 2010, pp. 11–23).
From 1904 to 1905 Leopold attended The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey (Low 2011) and from 1905 to 1909 the Sheffield Scientific School and Forest School at Yale. The Yale Forest School4 was one of the first in the nation, established in 1900 at the prompting of Gifford Pinchot and endowed by his family. Pinchot was a Yale alumnus who became chief of the U.S. Division of Forestry, which was renamed the U.S. Bureau of Forestry in 1901 and finally the United States Forest Service in 1905 (Miller 2001).5 Leopold imbibed Pinchot’s utilitarian thinking, recording in his lecture notes for a course on forest management: “In deciding ques-tions [on conflicting land use] it is the policy of the [Forest] Service to preserve the greatest good to the greatest num-ber in the long run” (Leopold 1908, pp. 974–975). Leopold adopted Pinchot’s conservation philosophy toward natural resources because it sufficed at that time (Meine 2010, p. 83).
2.2 Arizona and New Mexico
Upon graduation Leopold began his career in the Forest Ser-vice in the Southwest territories of Arizona and New Mexico. In July 1909 he reported to District 3, which included 21 national forests in the South and Southwest, at its headquar-ters in Albuquerque, New Mexico. From 1909 to 1911 he was forest assistant at the Apache National Forest in Ari-zona. His first major undertaking was leading a reconnais-sance party to estimate timber inventory in the Blue Range, spending August to October in the field (Meine 2010, pp.
2 Meine (2010, p. 503) described the statement as a “firm appeal for self-inquiry.”
3 All biographical information is drawn from Curt Meine’s biography of Leopold (Meine 2010). Leopold (1991) includes a compact chro-nology of Leopold’s life, while Leopold (2013) contains a more com-plete chronology.4 The Yale Forest School was renamed to “Yale School of Forestry” in 1921 with Pinchot’s consent. In 1972 the name was modified to “Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.” From July 1, 2020, the school will change its name to “Yale School of Environ-ment” and establish “The Forest School at the Yale School of the Environment,” which will have a clear identify and separate resources within the School of the Environment (Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies 2020).5 For histories of the progressive conservation movement, see Hays (1959) and Miller (2001).
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87–105) (Fig. 1).6 On September 22, 1909, Leopold and a colleague shot a pack of wolves and killed the mother wolf (Leopold [1909] 2013; Meine 2010, p. xxxi), an episode he recounted in his later essay “Thinking Like a Mountain” in ASCA (see Sect. 2.4.3).
From 1911 to 1912 Leopold was deputy supervisor at Car-son National Forest north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Besides working on typical chores of a deputy supervisor, Leopold edited the Pine Cone, the newsletter of the Carson National Forest, and worked on a new grazing plan for the Forest. In 1912 Leopold became supervisor of the Forest and married Estella Bergere, who was born into a prominent family in Santa Fe. His supervision was cut short by a bout of acute nephritis that he contracted after riding through two days of bad weather in April 1913, forcing him to go on medical leave in Burlington for more than a year (Meine 2010, pp. 106–132).
When Leopold returned to the Forest Service in October 1914, he was made assistant head of the Office of Grazing at Albuquerque, where he learnt the business of grazing and the concept of “carrying capacity,” the number of livestock a range could sustain, a concept he would employ and develop for the rest of his life (Meine 2010, pp. 132–137). From 1915 to 1919, Leopold was responsible for recreational policy at District 3 and also given free rein to organize sportsmen in New Mexico and Arizona into game protective associations
(GPAs) in a quasi-official way. A visit by William T. Hor-naday, the most widely known “wild life” conservationist at that time, to Albuquerque in the fall of 1915 as part of a speaking tour stoked Leopold’s passion for game protec-tion and augured his subsequent success with the GPAs.7 As a result of shifted priorities in the Forest Service dur-ing World War I, from 1918 to 1919 he served as secretary of the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce, advocating for civic improvement, including the draining of wetlands which went against the ecological wisdom he would develop later in his life (Meine 2010, pp. 144–174). Not long after Leo-pold would criticize indiscriminate boosterism (Leopold [1923] 1991a) and invoke “Mr Babbitt” in his writings (see Sect. 4.5).
From August 1919 to May 1924 Leopold was Assistant District Forester in Charge of Operations of District 3, occu-pying its second highest position. His responsibilities were to conduct inspection tours of the individual national forests, evaluate and report on their day-to-day functions, and rec-ommend changes. Such a wide purview enabled Leopold to broaden his thinking on forest and land conservation, prompting him to interpret how different components of lands interacted with each other, and exposed him to new conservation concerns.
Leopold revealed an important insight into his own think-ing when he commented in a 1940 letter to Gifford Pinchot that “the year 1920 marks a turning point from (what shall I call it? a certain viewpoint, as yet unnamed) to an ecological mode of thinking” (Leopold [1940] 2013, p. 814). Indeed, Leopold first used the word “ecological” in a 1920 article in which he discussed references to forests in the Book of Prophets of the Old Testament, gleaning insights into the relationship between humans and the environment dur-ing biblical times: “Isaiah (41–9) seems to have had some knowledge of forest types and the ecological relations of species” ([ 1920] 1991, p. 76; Meine 2010, pp. 183–184).
While continuing his game protection activities, Leopold began paying attention to soil erosion, vegetation change, and watershed function (1921a; 1946b). He also began rumi-nating on the role of game protection and management in the national forests and conferred on the theme of wilderness protection with Arthur Carhart, the first landscape architect to be employed by the Service. In a seminal article Leopold argued for setting aside wilderness areas in national for-ests (1921b) and followed through in 1922 by submitting a
Fig. 1 Aldo Leopold as Forest Assistant and chief of reconnaissance party at the Apache National Forest, Arizona, 1910 Courtesy of the Aldo Leopold Foundation and University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives
6 The reconnaissance was a fiasco under Leopold’s inexperienced leadership, but he would acquit himself well in a second reconnais-sance in the next year.
7 Leopold’s success at organizing sportsmen and advancing game protection enabled him to parry, with support from his superior Arthur Ringland, multiple urgent requests from Chief of the Forest Service Henry S. Graves to transfer him to Washington DC (Meine 2010, pp. 146–147, 152–153) and led to him receiving a congratu-latory letter from President Theodore Roosevelt in January 1917 (p. 158).
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proposal to set aside the headwaters of the Gila River in New Mexico as a wilderness area. This led to the 1924 establish-ment of the Gila Wilderness (Huggard 2001), the first in the country’s national forests (Meine 2010, pp. 175–228).
Toward the end of his tour in the Southwest Leopold wrote two landmark pieces that were inspired by his obser-vations of soil erosion and watershed degradation. The first was a manuscript, unpublished until 1979, titled “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest” (Leo-pold [1923] 1979; Leopold [1923] 1991b; Meine 2010, pp. 212–216). Using the concept of a “balance of nature,” Leo-pold concluded that the “organic resources”—forests, water, farms, and ranges—of the Southwest “bear a delicately bal-anced interrelation with each other” (Leopold [1923] 1991b, pp. 91, 93), Leopold discussed conservation as a moral, as opposed to a merely economic, issue. Drawing upon the met-aphysical thinking of Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky (1920) (see Sect. 4.4.2), Leopold proposed that the “‘dead’ earth” be viewed as an organism possessing a certain kind and degree of life, which humans intuitively respect. He also pondered whether the earth was made for man’s use and, granting that, asked if contemporary human culture can fol-low prior human cultures in living off the southwestern land-scape without inflicting damage to it. After receiving feed-back from some of his colleagues Leopold decided against publishing it (Meine 2010, pp. 215–216) and did not write again about humans’ moral responsibility for conservation until a decade later (Leopold [1933] 1991). Eventually, in “The Land Ethic” essay composed shortly before his death, Leopold would ground an ethical relation to the land in the community concept in ecology and individual responsibility (1949, pp. 201–226), instead of Ouspensky’s metaphysical organismic worldview.
The second was a 1924 article “Grass, Brush, Timber, and Fire in Southern Arizona,” in which Leopold put forth his theory of why ranges in four national forests experienced greater erosion after human settlement and grazing, which was accompanied by suppression of fire and brush species taking over the range. He challenged convention wisdom of the Forest Service by suggesting that overgrazing posed a greater risk of soil erosion than fire and should be checked (Leopold [1924] 1991a; Meine 2010, pp. 222–223).
2.3 Madison, Wisconsin
In 1924 Leopold became assistant and later associate direc-tor of the Forest Products Laboratory of the Forest Service in Madison, Wisconsin. Incongruity between his interest in broader human–environment relationships and “the indus-trial motif of this otherwise admirable institution” (Leopold [1947] 1987, p. 285) led him to resign in 1928 (Meine 2010, pp. 231–258). Leaving a secure job while having to support his wife Estella and five children was a bold decision.
From 1928 to 1932 Leopold conducted a survey of game conditions in eight states for the Sporting Arms and Ammu-nitions Manufacturers’ Institute (SAAMI), which culminated in his Report on Game Survey of the North Central States (Leopold 1931).8 The stint reinforced Leopold’s reputation as a leading figure in game conservation and allowed him to attend the 1931 Matamek Conference on Biological Cycles (Huntington 1931). It also provided him with materials and helped him secure a publisher for his 1933 textbook Game Management (Leopold [1933] 1986; Meine 2010, pp. 259–290). Game Management was a milestone in publica-tion on the topic and in Leopold’s intellectual development, being the culmination of his work up to that point and reveal-ing his nascent ecological thinking, reflecting similar shifts in other conservation fields. While Leopold analyzed game management using economic concepts from forestry, such as yield and productivity, the “theorems” he put forth satisfied economic conditions, aesthetic ideals, and “sound biology as well,” just as forestry was shifting toward “naturalism” ([1933] 1986, pp. 394–396). Leopold was quickly moving beyond such limited goals as increasing the productivity of “game crops” and embracing broader notions of land and wildlife management based on ecological principles (Wor-ster 1994a, pp. 271–274).
From 1932 to 1933, in the depth of the Great Depression, Leopold was a “consulting forester,” out of steady employ-ment but never idle. After completing his Game Manage-ment manuscript, he spent the summer of 1933 back in the southwestern forests of Arizona and New Mexico, supervis-ing soil erosion control work by the Civilian Conservation Corps (Helms 1985; Maher 2008), which was newly created on March 21, 1933, as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal (Meine 2010, pp. 291–306). Leopold delivered talks at conferences, including his landmark paper “Con-servation Ethic” ([1933] 1991), delivered in New Mexico, in which he called for a conservation ethic grounded in the emerging science of ecology, although his own ecological thinking had yet to fully mature (see Sect. 4.4.3).
2.4 Professorship at University of Wisconsin
In 1933 Leopold joined the University of Wisconsin’s Depart-ment of Agricultural Economics as Professor of Game Man-agement, the nation’s first such appointment.9 Leopold’s appointment was a propitious development for his career and
8 The eight states were Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Illi-nois, Indiana, Ohio, and Missouri.9 The University of Wisconsin is now known as the University of Wisconsin-Madison, following the merger in 1971 of public uni-versities in Wisconsin to form the University of Wisconsin System (Cronon and Jenkins 1999, pp. 521–596).
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the conservation cause. Since the beginning of the century the University had developed a strong tradition of providing service to the state, a concept that came to be known as the “Wisconsin Idea” (Stark 1995).10 This tradition, together with the New Deal conservation programs that were being rolled out in earnest from the early 1930s onward, gave Leopold an opportunity to develop and test his ideas on conservation. In addition to his teaching duties and research activities on wildlife ecology, Leopold was research director of the Univer-sity of Wisconsin Arboretum, Wild Life Refuge and Experi-mental Forest Preserve, managing it as a site for pioneering work in ecological restoration (Callicott 1999a; Court 2012; Greenwood 2017; Jordan and Lubick 2011; Leopold [1934] 1984; Leopold [1934] 1991a)11 and also participated in edu-cational outreach activities to farmers through the University’s agricultural extension service. Reflecting the evolution of his thinking and in the field, in the fall of 1938 Leopold began to refer to himself as “Professor of Wildlife Management,” which became official in 1939 when he became chairman of his own one-person Department of Wildlife Management, while retaining his appointment in the Department of Agri-cultural Economics (Meine 2010, pp. 387, 396).
2.4.1 Shack property
In the spring of 1935 Leopold purchased a worn-out alluvial farm along the Wisconsin River in Sauk County (named after the native Sauk and Fox Nation that had lived in the region in the 1700s). The only structure on the eighty-acre parcel of land northeast of Baraboo, Wisconsin, was a dilapi-dated chicken coop that the family fixed up for camping. Leopold initially called the structure Jagdschloss (hunting lodge), but the family eventually referred to it as simply “the shack” (Fig. 2).12
Fig. 2 Aldo Leopold and wife Estella Bergere Leopold at the shack, 1940 Courtesy of the Aldo Leopold Foundation and University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives
Fig. 3 Aldo Leopold and wife Estella planting pines, 1939 Courtesy of the Aldo Leopold Foundation and University of Wisconsin-Madi-son Archives
10 Jack Stark defines the Wisconsin Idea as “the University’s direct contributions to the state: to the government in the forms of serving in office, offering advice about public policy, providing informa-tion and exercising technical skill, and to the citizens in the forms of doing research directed at solving problems that are important to the state and conducting outreach activities” (1995, p. 2). A common expression of the Idea is “the boundaries of the University are the boundaries of the state” (pp. 1–2). The Wisconsin Idea was bolstered by the presence of two prominent economists, Richard T. Ely and John R. Commons, who groomed a generation of Wisconsin econo-mists who in turn played critical roles in developing New Deal agri-cultural policy (Gilbert and Baker 1997).11 Leopold’s speech delivered at the Arboretum’s dedication cer-emony on June 17, 1934 and titled “What Is the University of Wis-consin Arboretum, Wild Life Refuge, and Forest Experiment Pre-serve?” (Leopold [1934] 1984) is longer than the subsequent essay “The Arboretum and the University” (Leopold [1934] 1991a). Both the speech and the essay are available online as appendices to Cal-licott (1999a).12 The Central Sand Plains of Wisconsin is the result of sandy lake deposits of what was once glacial Lake Wisconsin, created during the last part of the Wisconsin Glaciation (c.19,000 or 18,000 before
present [BP]) when ice of the Green Bay lobe of the Laurentide Ice Sheet advanced onto the eastern end of the Baraboo Hills, damming the Wisconsin River. The drainage basin of the lake consists of late Cambrian sandstone. The lake itself consisted of a main basin and a few smaller basins, and drained multiple times when the ice dam failed. The last drainage occurred about 18,000 BP (Attig and Carson 2016; Clayton and Attig 1989, pp. 1–7). The Leopold shack is located on the sand plain in the southern part of the Lewiston basin (Attig and Carson 2016).
Footnote 32 (continued)
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During weekends and breaks from school, the Leopold family stayed at the shack and engaged in outdoor recrea-tion and ecological restoration of the land (Figs. 3, 4). Dur-ing the University’s spring break they planted pines, which Leopold figured was “historically the right thing to do,” other native trees, and shrubs (Leopold 2016, pp. 24–32). In the summertime they restored prairie species on the old cornfield in front of the shack (pp. 101–102). “For Leopold and his family the shack years were an experience in the slow sensitizing of people to land, the evolution of a sense of country” (Flader 1987b, p. 54). Leopold’s occupation as university professor gave him the luxury of not needing to extract economic value from his degraded shack property, and being neighbor with “backward” farmers who lived on economically poor farms but enjoyed a rich wild aesthetic harvest (Leopold 1949, pp. 46–47). The Leopold family’s activities at the shack contributed to Wisconsin’s “especially rich tradition of people who have committed themselves to the land in a passionate and self-reflective way” (Cronon 1990, p. 92).13
2.4.2 Developments in Leopold’s scientific and conservation thought
Milestones in the evolution of Leopold’s scientific understand-ing of the land include: his attendance at the aforementioned 1931 Matamek Conference on Biological Cycles, where he met Charles Elton, a leading expert in animal ecology whose work (Elton 1927) would influence his thinking; his exposure to the concept of the biotic community (Flader [1974] 1994, pp. 151–152), consisting of “all the plants and all the animals in a given unit of environment” which may be compared to an organism (Taylor 1935, pp. 294–296, 305); his study trip to Germany and Czechoslovakia in 1935, where highly artificial-ized management of game and forests, especially for maximiz-ing the deer population and timber yields, led him to realize the importance of ecological processes and preservation of the wilderness character of the landscape (Flader [1974] 1994, pp. 139–144; Meine 2010, pp. 351–360); two hunting trips in 1936–1938 to the Rio Gavilan region of the Sierra Madre Occidental in Chihuahua, Mexico (Meine 2010, pp. 367–368; Warren 2016, pp. 3–8, 223–228), which he described as “a biota still in perfect aboriginal health” (Leopold [1947] 1987, pp. 285–286).14
Milestones in Leopold’s conservation activities include: his spearheading of cooperative game management at the Riley farms in western Dane County, Wisconsin in 1931 (Leopold 1940; Leopold [1934] 1991c; Meine 2010, pp. 281–282; Silbernagel and Silbernagel 2003) and Faville Grove farms in Jefferson County in 1933 (McCabe 1978; Meine 2010, pp. 312–313), which became vital research sites for Leopold and his graduate students; the forma-tion of the Wilderness Society in 1935, of which he was a founding member (Leopold [1935] 2013; Meine 2010, pp. 342–344; Sutter 2002); his involvement, along with other leading thinkers on land use at the University of Wisconsin and other conservation experts, in the Coon Creek Water-shed Demonstration Project in the driftless (i.e., unglaciated) area of southwestern Wisconsin from 1933 onward, the first project undertaken by the new Soil Erosion Service, later renamed Soil Conservation Service in 1935 (Anderson 2002; Flader 2011, p. 53; Henderson and Hembre 1955; Leopold [1935] 1991a); his consulting work in 1938 for forest man-agement at the Huron Mountain Club near Lake Superior in Michigan, which gave him a chance to integrate forestry and wildlife ecology at the landscape level (Flader [1974] 1994, pp. 159–163; Flaspohler and Meine 2006; Meine 2010, pp. 385–386); his efforts to build a conservation alliance between the Wilderness Society and the Ecological Society of America in 1940, which was spurned by Victor Shelford
Fig. 4 Leopold family at the shack. Back row: Aldo, Estella, Luna, Starker. Front row: Nina, Estella Jr., Gus. Carl took the photo Cour-tesy of the Aldo Leopold Foundation and University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives
13 The Leopold family’s restoration activities at the shack left a mark on the Wisconsin landscape (Waller and Rooney 2008) and led to establishment of the Leopold Memorial Reserve (Laubach 2014; Liegel 1982; Liegel 1988) and the Leopold-Pine Island Important Bird Area (Aldo Leopold Foundation n.d.-a).
14 Leopold published a few articles about his trips to Germany (1936a, b, c; [1936] 2013) and Mexico (1937b; [1937b] 1991).
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(Callicott 2015; Warren 2008); and his appointment to the Wisconsin Conservation Commission from 1943 until his death in 1948, which saw him immersed in the politics of conservation, especially in the difficult task of educating the public about deer overpopulation in northern Wisconsin (Flader [1974] 1994, pp. 168–260; Leopold [1946] 1991; Meine 2010, pp. 445–447).
Leopold participated in a post-war surge of conserva-tion activities, including the founding of the Conservation Foundation in 1948 (Meine 2010, p. 495; Warren 2016, pp. xxvi–xxviii). Other founding figures included Fairfield Osborn, author of Our Plundered Planet (Osborn 1948), and William Vogt, whose simultaneous book Road to Survival (Vogt 1948) reflected the Malthusian and racial perspective on human population and resources which he discussed with Leopold during the 1940s (Cushman 2013, pp. 244–273; Powell 2016, pp. 158–185; Robertson 2012, pp. 36–60). These activities were stimulated by the international out-look that was emerging after the global conflict of World War II and anxiety about potential unrest and an uncertain future portended by the atomic bomb and other scientific and technological advances (Graebner 1991).
2.4.3 Writing of Great Possessions manuscript
In August 1941 Leopold and Hans Albert Hochbaum, a tal-ented graduate student with a keen mind and fine graphic arts skills, drew up a definite plan for a project they had been discussing for some time: a book of essays with Leopold pro-viding the words and Hochbaum the artwork (Meine 2010, pp. 377, 416). Leopold had already written and published some of the essays and began drafting additional essays in a desultory manner. In November, Harold Strauss, an editor at Knopf approached Leopold independently with an idea for “‘a good book on wild-life observation…a personal book recounting adventures in the field’” (Meine 2010, p. 419).
What had begun in Leopold’s mind as a collection of “ecological essays, illustrated” (Meine 2010, p. 419) evolved over time with feedback from Hochbaum and Knopf. With immense skill, frankness, and persistence, Hochbaum pressed Leopold to admit in his essays his own involvement early in his career in predator extermination, compelling Leopold to write “Thinking Like a Mountain” (pp. 453–459). In the essay Leopold described his killing of a wolf, how he had “reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes,” and “sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.” Since then, he had observed the damage wrought by deer overpopulation on the landscape and come to regret his naïve understanding and simple utilitarian assumptions (1949, p. 130; Meine 2009b).
After reviewing Leopold’s first set of thirteen essays, Knopf’s editor Clinton Simpson asked for a chapter in which Leopold could clarify his unique thinking on conservation
(Meine 2010, p. 461). Thereafter, Leopold began organizing the essays in almanac form (p. 462), added philosophical essays and a foreword, and took pains to organize the diverse collection of essays into a coherent whole (pp. 485–486).
Leopold also composed a nomothetic landmark essay, “The Land Ethic,” articulating in a coherent way the urgent need to integrate ecological perspective into land use. Splicing together text from three earlier essays—“The Con-servation Ethic” ([1933] 1991), “A Biotic View of Land” ([1939] 1991a), and “The Ecological Conscience” ([1947] 1991a)—and adding new text, Leopold, with calm and a profound concern for land and civilization, appealed for self-inquiry, the extension of ethics beyond the human com-munity to include land, and the evolution of a land ethic in the individual and in society (pp. 501–505). Leopold named the manuscript Great Possessions, after one of his favorite essays (Meine 2010, pp. 449–450). Charles W. Schwartz, an illustrator, replaced Hochbaum, who had bowed out earlier due to time constraints (Meine 2010, pp. 494, 504, 507).
Leopold sent the Great Possessions manuscript to Simp-son in September 1947. Simpson replied in November saying Knopf’s staff and reviewers felt the manuscript was incoher-ent and required fundamental revision.15 Leopold was disap-pointed with the rejection of his manuscript as it was, and with Knopf’s lack of appreciation of the manuscript’s unity. Leopold’s son Luna took over the task of finding a publisher and approached Phillip Vaudrin at Oxford University Press. On April 14, 1948, Vaudrin called Leopold informing him that Oxford wished to publish his book (Meine 2010, pp. 509–510, 517).
Leopold wrote a new foreword for the manuscript that was submitted to Oxford, replacing an earlier foreword that was written in 1947 (Ribbens 1987a). The 1947 foreword is valuable in helping readers appreciate ASCA and Leo-pold’s thinking in general: it was longer and provided auto-biographical context for the essays (Leopold [1947] 1987). Leopold intended to revise the 1947 foreword as an appendix for the Oxford manuscript, which did not happen due to his sudden death (Ribbens 1987a, p. 277).
15 The comments from Knopf reveal the publisher’s perception of the unusual character of the manuscript and of readers’ expectations:What we like best is the nature observations, and the more objective narratives and essays. We like less the subjective parts—that is, the philosophical reflections, which are less fresh, and which one reader finds sometimes “fatuous.” The ecological argument everyone finds unconvincing; and as in previous drafts, it is not tied up with the rest of the book.In short, the book seems unlikely to win approval from readers or to be a successful publication as it now stands, and a more fundamental kind of revision is needed than the detailed, page-by-page comments you asked [for] would suggest (cited in Meine 2010, p. 509).
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2.5 Death and publication of A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
With the happy news of his manuscript being finally accepted by a publisher, Leopold, his wife Estella, and their youngest child Estella Jr. travelled to the shack the follow-ing weekend, intending to spend the following week, which was spring break at the University, planting pines in keep-ing with their family tradition. On the morning of April 21, Leopold noticed smoke rising from a neighbor’s farm and rushed to help, joining a small contingent of neighbors to put out the spreading grass fire. Leopold was alone when he was stricken by a heart attack and fell unconscious. The fire, which had weakened, swept lightly over his body (Flader 1987b, pp. 58–61; Meine 2010, pp. 518–520).
After his death a team of family, friends, and close associ-ates worked together to see Leopold’s manuscript through the publication process, with Luna in charge of editing. Leo-pold’s original title for Part I of ASCA containing vignettes of family life at the shack was “A Sauk County Almanac.” It was changed to “A Sand Country Almanac” and ultimately to “A Sand County Almanac.” “The Land Ethic,” the first essay of Part III “The Upshot” was moved to the end, mak-ing it the final essay in the book (Meine 2010, pp. 523–525; Ribbens 1987b, pp. 103, 107–108). A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There was published by Oxford Uni-versity Press on October 20, 1949.16
3 Aftermath
3.1 Environmental movement
Conservation activities in the USA continued into the 1950s (Jarrett 1958), including the landmark conference on Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Thomas 1956). These activities were tributary to the environmental move-ment of the 1960s and 1970s, which was more radical in nature and supported by grassroots (Fox 1981; Gottlieb 2005; Hays 1987; Meine 2009a).17 A litany of environmen-tal issues and the 1968 “Earthrise” image by NASA (Lazier 2011; Poole 2008) led to a groundswell of environmental consciousness and observance of the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970 (Rome 2013). In landmark publications concerned
thinkers examined the human–environment relationship and called for new thinking in human society to adjust to the ecological dynamics and finite nature of the planet (Barbour 1973; Boulding 1966; Carson 1962; Commoner 1972; Disch 1970; Ehrlich 1968; Lovelock 1979; McHarg 1969; Mead-ows et al. 1972; Naess 1973; Schumacher 1973; Shepard and McKinley 1969; Udall 1963; White 1967).18 ASCA, now available in paperback editions, resonated with this grow-ing environmental consciousness and grew in popularity to become “the philosophical touchstone of the modern envi-ronmental movement” (Flader and Callicott 1991, p. ix).
The high-profile environmental insults and rising environ-mental awareness of the 1960s and 1970s led to the emer-gence of the new fields of environmental ethics (Kawall 2015) and environmental history (McNeill 2010, pp. 349–350), as well as works in literary and environmental studies that were organized as ecocriticism during the 1990s (Balaev and Glotfelty 2012; Glotfelty and Fromm 1996). Citations of ASCA grew alongside academic literature on ecology and the environment, see Fig. 5 and also Fig. 3 in Leopold (2004), although not all citing literature discussed ASCA in a substantial way: ASCA has become such a clas-sic environmental text that it is sometimes cited in passing.
After his death Leopold’s family continued to develop their relationship with the land. Wife Estella grew into her own person, worked on behalf of a number of environmental causes, and continued to visit the shack. Starker was a well-known wildlife biologist and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Luna helped develop the field of fluvial geomorphology and worked for the Soil Conservation Service and U.S. Geological Survey before joining the fac-ulty of the University of California, Berkeley. Nina Leopold Bradley’s life connected most deeply with the shack. She and her second husband Charles Bradley built the Bradley Study Center on the Leopold Reserve in 1976 to facilitate ecologi-cal research. This work was instrumental in the founding of the Aldo Leopold Foundation and the construction of the Leopold Center. Carl was a well-known plant physiologist and enjoyed a long research career at the Boyce Thomp-son Institute on Cornell University’s Ithaca campus. Estella spent many years at the U.S. Geological Survey before join-ing the faculty at the University of Washington (Aldo Leo-pold Foundation n.d.-b).
Some of the environmental intellectuals who were inspired by Leopold include ecological economists William Rees and Richard Norgaard. Rees was profoundly influenced by Leopold, having read his works while studying ecology in 16 Reviewers of ASCA lauded Leopold’s observation powers, skill-
ful writing, his expansive concern for nature, as well as Schwartz’s illustrations. Reviews can be found in the Aldo Leopold Archives, 10-6 box 5 folder 5, http://digit al.libra ry.wisc.edu/1711.dl/aldol eopol d.alsan dcoun ty.i0005 .17 Guha (1989) observed that the radical environmental movement in the USA possessed characteristics unique to the country and was therefore unsuitable for universal application.
18 For a review of Ian McHarg’s work, see the special issue of Socio-Ecological Practice Research, 1, 3-4, October 2019, titled Design With Nature at 50: Retrospect and Prospect (https ://link.sprin ger.com/journ al/42532 /1/3).
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the 1960s. Leopold’s writings reinforced Rees’s own intui-tion acquired while he was working on his grandfather’s farm during his youth. Rees’s experience on the farm and the profound sense of connection to the land it evoked ultimately led to his work on human carrying capacity and ecological footprint analysis within the ecological economics frame-work (Rees 1992; Wackernagel and Rees 1996). According to Rees, there is a close compatibility between Leopold’s land community concept and his sense of correctness in promoting the “integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community,” with the premise of ecological economics that the human economy constitutes a subsystem of the natural economy (William Rees, email communication).
Norgaard was introduced to Leopold by David Brower (then executive director of the Sierra Club and later founder of Friends of the Earth and then Earth Island Institute) and, like Rees, read Leopold’s works as a student. Norgaard’s understanding of Aldo Leopold was enhanced through his acquaintance with three of Leopold’s children. As an undergraduate at University of California, Berkeley, in the early sixties and then as a young professor there beginning in 1970, Norgaard had the good fortune to have personally known Berkeley Professor Starker Leopold. Norgaard also came to know Luna Leopold when Luna was a Berkeley professor in fluvial geomorphology. Luna influenced Nor-gaard’s career in two important ways. First, Luna encour-aged Norgaard to publish his first two publications from his Master’s research in a peer-reviewed natural science jour-nal. According to Norgaard, Luna was one of the early flu-vial geomorphologist to think in statistical terms instead of “brute mechanics” and Luna’s leadership encouraged Nor-gaard to think in new ways, contributing to his openness toward “Methodological Pluralism,” the title of Norgaard’s
contribution to the first issue of Ecological Economics (Nor-gaard 1989). Finally, Norgaard also came to know more about Aldo through Carl Leopold, with whom he sat on a panel discussion at a meeting of environmental scientists. Despite his training in economics, Norgaard was made to feel welcome by the Leopold family in the community of natural scientists (Richard Norgaard, email communication).
3.2 Leopold’s oeuvre
Leopold’s writings and philosophy on conservation are best appreciated through the landscapes of southwestern and midwestern America, regions where he had lived close to the land and understood it well enough through books, per-sonal experience, and ecological research to have insights into its special noumenal essence (to allude to Ouspensky’s concept, see Sect. 4.4.2). At the same time, his conservation thinking and methods were informed by a global circula-tion of ideas about politics, economy, society, history, and ecology that structured notions of place, nature, race, and human-land relations.
ASCA, being Leopold’s chef d’œuvre, is his most recog-nizable work. The rest of Leopold’s oeuvre was organized by historian Susan L. Flader and other scholars and preserved at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries as the Aldo Leopold Archives. Leopold’s extensive bibliography, which was compiled principally by Flader, can be found in Leopold (1991, pp. 349–370) and Meine (2010, pp. 603–620).
Leopold’s other writings have been published or repub-lished over the years. Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold (Leopold 1953) contains materials from Leopold’s
Fig. 5 According to a search in Scopus and Web of Sci-ence databases on March 3, 2020, A Sand County Alma-nac and Sketches Here and There has been cited 4211 and about 3850 times respectively, including 19 and 10 citations thus far in 2020. This chart shows the annual citation fig-ures. Google Scholar returned about 11,089 citations on the same day, but unfortunately it only allows one to view the most recent 1000 citations
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hunting journals and four essays selected and edited by Luna.19 Five edited collections of his writings have been published: The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays (Leopold 1991), edited by Flader and J. Baird Callicott, consists of pub-lications that span Leopold’s life and conservation interests; Aldo Leopold’s Southwest (Leopold 1995), edited by David E. Brown and Neil B. Carmony, comprises Leopold’s writings composed during his time in the Southwest or later writings in which he dwelt on the region20; For the Health of the Land: Previously Unpublished Essays and Other Writings (Leopold 1999), edited by J. Baird Callicott and Eric T. Freyfogle, gath-ers articles and manuscripts in which Leopold discusses the conservation of rural wildlife and his developing idea of land health, as well as forty short essays published in the Wisconsin Agriculturist and Farmer, a widely read farm newspaper, on how farmers can conserve wildlife on their land with simple and cost-effective ways; A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation (Leopold 2013), edited by Curt Meine, includes the entire ASCA, other writings on ecology and conservation, and selected journal entries and cor-respondence; and Aldo Leopold on Forestry and Conservation: Toward a Durable Scale of Values (Leopold 2018), edited by forest ecologist (and Leopold’s great-grandson) Jed Meunier and Curt Meine, contains many of Leopold’s articles from the Journal of Forestry and other writings focused on forest and forest conservation.
Leopold’s talks and lectures, delivered in person or on radio, are noteworthy. Freyfogle (2017b) studied notes and manuscripts of some one hundred of Leopold’s talks in Wis-consin and distilled four central messages: land is a com-munity of which humans are members; the land community can be more or less healthy; the goal of conservation is land health; and a radical reorientation of the American people and culture to land was needed to achieve land health. Stan-ley Temple has shared on Wisconsin Public Radio excerpts from transcripts of Leopold’s radio talks from 1933 to 1936 on the University of Wisconsin’s College of the Air program (Temple 2017). However, recordings of Leopold’s voice remain elusive (Aldo Leopold Foundation 2017).
4 Leopold’s thinking and the scholarship it inspired
Leopold read widely and in his own writings used concepts he could identify with or found helpful, probably based on memory as his occasional misspellings and misquota-tions suggest. That he quoted thinkers and their concepts (e.g., Ouspensky’s noumenon or Hadley’s statement, both discussed below), does not imply that he subscribed to or even fully understood their philosophies, nor, indeed, read their books entire. His usage of scientific concepts was more solid, as he had access to the latest scientific literature and conferred regularly with other scientists. These concepts became building blocks for his own conservation thinking.
In addition to numerous journal articles, book chap-ters, and magazine and online features, Leopold has been the subject of: three edited volumes of commentary (Cal-licott 1987a; Knight and Riedel 2002; Tanner 1987) and a forthcoming fourth volume (Forbes forthcoming); a book of selected quotations and commentaries (Meine and Knight 1999); three National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institutes, organized by Joan McGregor and Dan Shilling in 2009, 2011, and 2016; a feature-length documen-tary Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and A Land Ethic for Our Time (Dunsky et al. 2011), an extensive bibliography (Meine 2017a); as well as two special professional journal issues: Wildlife Society Bulletin 26 (4) Winter, 1998 and Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 5 (4), 2011.
4.1 Race and Native Americans
Given the notions of race circulating during his time (Gould 1996; Omi and Winant 2015; Smedley and Smedley 2012), Leopold’s racial attitudes and its interaction with his con-servation thinking deserve attention (e.g., Merchant 2003). Two groups figured prominently in Leopold’s writings, Americans of European descent or “the Nordic race” ([1924] 1991b, p. 106) that constituted mainstream American society and “took over from” ([1939] 1991b, p. 255) the second group, the original human inhabitants of the land in Amer-ica, or Native Americans, as well as those in Mexico. In a cultural milieu that saw the use of phrases such as “racial instincts” (Leopold [1924] 1991c, p. 125) and “racial genius” (Leopold [1924] 1991b, p. 106), Leopold felt that the ability of Euro-American society to achieve conservation, or “self-control in environment” ([1924] 1991c, pp. 126, 127), is “the ultimate test of our vaunted superiority” (p. 127), the result of which will be judged by posterity (1949, p. 223; [1923] 1991b, pp. 96–97). Leopold’s 1933 article “Conser-vation Ethic” in Journal of Forestry was reprinted in 1946 under the title “Racial Wisdom and Conservation” in Jour-nal of Heredity (1946c). Leopold’s conservation ethic was
19 Essays on conservation published in Round River were inserted into an enlarged version of ASCA, constituting its Part III while Part III of the original became Part IV. The enlarged edition was published as A Sand County Almanac with Other Essays on Conservation from Round River by Oxford University Press in 1966. The paperback ver-sions of the original and enlarged editions were, respectively, released in 1968 by Oxford University Press and in 1970 by Sierra Club/Bal-lantine Books (Callicott 2014, p. 21).20 This collection was first published in 1990 as Aldo Leopold’s Wil-derness by Stackpole Books.
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introduced in the preamble as providing an ecological basis for eugenics (p. 275). How the article came to be republished here is unclear. There is no evidence that Leopold was aware of or acceded to this use of his article.
Leopold’s relationship with the Indigenous communi-ties was complicated and reflective of his times. Leopold’s awareness of Native peoples came from his reading of explorers’ tales in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Amer-ica and his experience in the southwestern and midwestern landscapes where he lived most of his life, and where Native peoples and culture remained (albeit in a diminished condi-tion at the time).21 Leopold recognized that Natives peoples had lived on the land for centuries while leaving it “undam-aged” ([1923] 1991b, p. 96). After his first hunting trip to the Rio Gavilan Occidental in Mexico, Leopold reflected on the aboriginal health of the land which was untouched by the “Juggernaut” of economic progress, noting the light modifi-cations that were undertaken by “the Indians” ([1937] 1991). He was effusive in his description: “There once were men capable of inhabiting a river without disrupting the harmony of its life. They must have lived in thousands on the Gavilan, for their works are everywhere” (Leopold 1949, p. 150). At the same time, Leopold used Native peoples, in a manner that now seems awkward, to illustrate ecological concepts, noting that “the characteristic number of Indians in virgin America was small” ([1941] 1991a, p. 282), and suggested the “wild Indian” ([1941] 1991b, p. 289) or “Apache Indian” was nearly “extinct” in the Sierra Madre Occidental ([1937] 1991, p. 239). The presence of Native peoples and sense of a particular local place in ASCA was diminished when Leo-pold’s original name for Part I, “A Sauk County Almanac” was replaced posthumously by “A Sand County Almanac.”
The relationship between the environmental ethic of Leopold and that of the North American Indigenous com-munities is complex, requires careful analysis, and remains an underdeveloped area of scholarship. Both ethics appear to be similar in emphasizing the cultivation of a close rela-tionship with the land, one in which the human being is a “plain member and citizen” of the “land community” (Leo-pold 1949, p. 204) or “relatives” with “living beings (i.e., animals, plants, etc.) and interconnected collectives (i.e., forests, ‘the land,’ etc.)” (Whyte 2015, p. 1). This perceived
similarity between the environmental ethic of Indigenous communities and Leopold has been discussed by Euro-American scholars (Callicott 1982; Callicott and Nelson 2004; Shilling 2009). Interpreting Indigenous wisdom for mainstream American society, Anishnaabe scientist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer observed: “[t]raditional eco-logical knowledge is not unique to Native American culture. It is born of long intimacy and attentiveness to a homeland and can arise wherever people are materially and spiritually integrated with their landscape. The writings of…Aldo Leo-pold in ‘The Land Ethic’ and others…express this impera-tive most powerfully” (Kimmerer 2000, p. 9). Kimmerer further noted that it is imperative for Americans living in the immigrant culture of the USA to learn to “become indig-enous to this place”(p. 9), as Leopold did.
Kyle Whyte (2015, pp. 8–15) identified three serious issues that must be addressed before one can discuss the similarity between the environmental ethics of Indigenous communities and Leopold. First, certain characteristics of Leopold’s model of land stewardship make it difficult for many Indigenous peoples to identify with it or consider it useful. Although Leopold restored his shack property with his family, engaged the wider community in cooperative con-servation practices, and imagined a land ethic as “evolv[ing] in the minds of a thinking community” (1949, p. 225), his writings and conservation philosophy were more individu-alistic in nature and understated the contributions from his family and community members. Whyte observed that Leo-pold’s “own individual learning, perceptiveness and ideas are implicitly celebrated in his writings” (2015, p. 11).22 Second, Leopold’s land ethic was based on two narrative sequences, Leopold’s explicit account of the development of ethics from interpersonal ethics to ethics between individu-als and society, and finally to ethical relation to the land, and a narrative of “progress” from a pre-industrial society to an industrial, settler-colonial society, which ultimately results in environmental crises. These narrative sequences reflect the assumptions of settler society and are “entirely implausible from many Indigenous perspectives” (p. 13). Finally, any discussion of Indigenous environmental ethic and Leopold’s land ethic should not privilege the latter by using it to interpret the former.
Leopold’s ecological wildlife conservation bears a closer affinity to traditional ecological knowledge of Indigenous peoples than does the dominant utilitarian “resource man-agement” paradigm that Leopold was himself challenging. While the post-cutover forests in Wisconsin sustained con-siderable deer damage during the 1940s when Leopold was
22 Whyte contrasted Leopold’s individualistic ethic with the work of Deborah McGregor, an Anishinaabe writer who also works on envi-ronmental issues.
21 Leopold’s youngest child Estella Jr. recalled: “We always cringed…when we heard and read about how in 1832 Chief Black-hawk put his Sauk people, women and children, on a raft just below the present Sauk City on the Wisconsin River only to have federal troopers shoot them one by one with their rifles from the south bank. I always hated to think about that tragedy, which is now commem-orated by a bronze historical plaque marking the place by the river where the ambush occurred. Chief Blackhawk himself escaped and hid for a while in the hills. We used to pass that site every week-end on our way to and from the Shack. It always gave me sobering thoughts” (Leopold 2016, p. 9).
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lobbying with little success for higher quotas during the annual hunting seasons, the forests on the Bad River, Lac du Flambeau, and Menominee Indian reservations were rela-tively unscathed during the 1960s due to year-round hunting of bucks and does by the Indigenous communities (Flader [1974] 1994, pp. 236–237, 266–267). Such hunting practices appear to be beyond the paradigm of Leopold and main-stream society: “Whites hunting with conventional methods under the usual game regulations would not be able to keep a deer herd trimmed to such a low density” (pp. 266–267).
Priscilla Solis Ybarra interpreted ASCA as an example of Mexican–American perspective on the environment, noting Leopold’s stint in New Mexico and that his wife Estella was a Mexican–American of Spanish descent (2016, pp. 8–9). According to Ybarra, Leopold’s land ethic resonates with “goodlife writing,” Mexican–American and Chicanas/os literature published between 1848 and 2010 that “embraces the values of simplicity, sustenance, dignity, and respect” (pp. 4–9). Indeed, as daughter Estella Jr. recalls, “the Span-ish language augmented our heritage” and the family sang Spanish songs at the shack (Leopold 2016, pp. 109, 272).
In a chapter titled “Alien Land Ethic: The Distance Between,” Lauret Savoy recounted her experience reading ASCA as a fourteen-year-old. Although she was inspired by Leopold’s “intimate images of land and seasons in place,” she was profoundly troubled by his lack of reference to the history of enslavement and discrimination of African-Amer-icans in the USA (Savoy 2015, pp. 32–34). To recuperate the human family and the land, Savoy called for cultivating “an intergenerational capacity for locating ourselves within many inheritances: as citizens of the land, of nations even within a nation, and of Earth” (p. 47).23
Non-Caucasian international scholars have produced research on Leopold (e.g., Lin 2014; Özdağ 2017), a non-issue that should not raise eyebrows.
4.2 History
Leopold was an avid reader of history and literature in gen-eral and was especially interested in the significant works of historical adventures of America’s early explorers. He was aware of the influence of the nation’s wilderness on its history and culture, heroically exemplified in the success-ful pioneer who established himself in the midst of a harsh wilderness. Having lived two doors away from Frederick Jackson Turner in Madison, Leopold was aware of Turner’s history of the frontier (Meine 2010, pp. 233, 352). Leopold prefigured environmental history when he called for an “ecological interpretation of history,” suggesting that the
succession of Kentucky cane-lands to bluegrass led to politi-cal ramifications in the region (1949, p. 205; Meine 1987).24
Roderick Nash was the first historian to study Leopold in his study of Wilderness in the American Mind ([1967] 2014, pp. 182–199) and also identified American writers who anticipated Leopold’s land ethic (1987).
Susan L. Flader wrote the first monograph on Leopold, titled Thinking Like a Mountain. Flader analyzed “the devel-opment of Leopold’s thought at a level where observation and experience, science and philosophy, policy and politics converge” on the issue of deer management and deer-wolf-forest interrelationships in Arizona and New Mexico, as well as Wisconsin ([1974] 1994, pp. xvi–xvii).25 Flader’s study was carefully researched and written and benefitted from interviews with people who had interacted with Leopold. It stands out from later secondary literature in two princi-pal ways. First, Flader interpreted Leopold’s land ethic as an evolving entity, recognizing that Leopold “presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution, which in turn is a product of evolution in the minds of countless individuals” (Flader [1974] 1994, p. 269). Leopold’s evolving land ethic can be traced back to the outdoor ethic his father imparted to him (Flader and Callicott 1991, pp. 12–13). Flader also interpreted “integrity, stability, and beauty” as values in which Leopold grounded his understanding of the human-land relationship. His understanding of the land ethic and the three values evolved over his lifetime in response to his changing understanding of the environment and these changes were reflected in “Thinking Like a Mountain” (Flader [1974] 1994, pp. 34–35). Flader interpreted Leo-pold’s land ethic at the end of his life, his most “enduring contribution,” as “his conception of land health, or the phi-losophy of a natural self-regulating system, coupled with his assertion of individual obligation” (p. 270).
Second, Flader’s analysis was no hagiography, having identified flaws in Leopold’s thinking. She noted that Leo-pold’s ability to perceive and analyze ecological processes and environmental changes in Wisconsin was hampered by his preoccupation with the public problem of deer in his role as a member of the Wisconsin Conservation Commission from 1943 until his death (p. 208), his familiarity with expe-riences of deer management of other states (p. 241; Leopold et al. 1947), and his emphasis on irruptions and deer herd reduction, which might have prevented him from consider-ing the possibility of environmental management for deer
23 In the chapter Savoy compared Leopold’s land ethic with her father Willard Savoy’s novel Alien Land (Savoy 1949).
24 The situation, we now know, was more complex than what Leo-pold’s account suggests. Worster (1993, pp. 45–46) pointed out that bluegrass was inadvertently imported by immigrants from Europe.25 According to Flader, “Leopold used the expression ‘thinking like a mountain’ to characterize objective or ecological thinking; it should not be viewed as personification” ([1974] 1994, pp. 1, fn 1).
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(Flader [1974] 1994, p. 244). Conversely, his effectiveness on the commission was affected by his failure to recognize that his call for deer herd reduction was based on ecological complexity which the public did not yet share or understand (pp. 224–226). Twenty years later, Flader observed that her study showed “the importance of an open, inquiring mind” and that “Leopold was most openminded about problems in which he was not deeply involved through professional commitment or public advocacy” (pp. xiii–xiv).
Curt Meine’s biography of Leopold, first published in 1988, is an important source of information about Leopold’s life. Meine’s familiarity with Leopold’s life–work, and his own roots in the mid-West meant that his writings contain remarkable insights about Leopold (Meine 2004, 2013). In her biography Marybeth Lorbiecki gave equal attention to later conservation figures who continued Leopold’s work (2016).
Donald Worster considered “The Land Ethic” essay as singularly marking the advent of the “Age of Ecology” but noted that its foundation in the science of ecology and ecol-ogy’s later shift toward economistic paradigms of mecha-nism and productivity undermined its message (1994a, pp. 284–290). Worster (1999) observed that while Leopold was a pioneer in integrating ecological and evolutionary insights into human history, he underestimated the endurance of industrial civilization, notwithstanding the poignancy of ASCA. “He seems to have believed that he was living at one of those axial moments of history, when profoundly new religions, philosophies, and ethics are born” (Worster 1999, p. 239).
Julianne Warren’s Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey was the first monograph that analyzed Aldo Leopold’s conservation thinking, which developed along two lines of inquiry: the science of the land and the conservative land use that would promote land health, and policies to encourage people to want to engage in conservative land use and follow through in practice (2016, p. 10). The monograph ends with Leopold developing the concept of land health in the last years of his life.
4.3 Science
4.3.1 Ecological science and wildlife management
Leopold’s methods are noteworthy because he was a pio-neering figure in game and wildlife research. He drew upon his prior experience in inspecting national forests. For his game surveys for SAAMI, at each state he began by first visiting the state capitol and university to gain an impression of local conditions and problems, as well as acquire a list of items to look for in the field and persons to contact. In the field he gathered information from hundreds of people from all walks of life, seeking to perceive trends during, not after,
the course of fieldwork. After fieldwork Leopold returned to the capitol and university to check on information and seek advice on its interpretation (Meine 2010, pp. 262–263). In 1933, Leopold shared the conventional thinking that game management involved “working with farmers, setting up demonstration areas, planting food and cover, and tallying the gains” (Meine 2010, p. 366).
As a university professor Leopold and his students pur-sued scientific investigations on ecological characteristics of species or the environment, or what he called “deep-digging research” (Leopold 1948, pp. 926–928 [2–4]). Leopold’s scientific thinking and methods evolved considerably dur-ing his career, although there were limits to his open-mind-edness.26 In “Some Fundamentals” Leopold qualified his use of “balance of nature,” noting that it “compresses into three words an enormously complex chain of phenomena” ([1923] 1991b, p. 91). Leopold’s subsequent research into land and wildlife ecology gradually revealed this complexity, beginning with “Grass, Brush, Timber, and Fire in South-ern Arizona” ([1924] 1991a). Until his explicit rejection of “balance of nature” ([1939] 1991a, p. 267), Leopold would half-heartedly invoke the concept, for instance mentioning it only once in Game Management ([1933] 1986, p. 26).27
By the late 1930s Leopold was using a variety of concepts to describe how the land works, and he combined them in his most important theoretical contribution, “A Biotic View of Land” ([1939] 1991a). Having an accurate “mental image” of land is important because “a truer picture of the biotic mechanism” might enable economists and philosophers to give better advice on land use (p. 267). Leopold’s expanded view of a biotic community, or biota, “includes not only plants and animals, but soils and waters as well” (p. 267). Adapting Charles Elton’s pyramid of numbers and adopting his food chain concept (1927, pp. 55–59, 68–70), Leopold conceived of the biotic community as a biotic pyramid with successive layers of soil, plants, insects, insectivores, her-bivores, and carnivores. Energy flows upward through food chains and flows downward through death and decay. Over time evolutionary processes increased the complexity of the pyramid, but human’s violent changes in the land through predator extermination, pollution, and importation of exotic species through transportation upset the composition and
26 See the discussion on Flader’s Thinking Like a Mountain ([1974] 1994) in Sect. 4.2.27 “The so-called ‘balance of nature’ is simply a name for the assumed tendency of the population curves of various species in an undisturbed plant and animal community to keep each other horizon-tal. The growth of biological knowledge trends strongly to show that while population curves may oscillate about a horizontal median, a single curve seldom or never stays horizontal from year to year even in virgin terrain. Fluctuation in numbers is nearly universal” (Leopold [1933] 1986, p. 26).
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functioning of the pyramid, leading to cumulative wastage. “This wastage in the biotic organism is similar to disease in an animal, except that it does not culminate in absolute death. The organism recovers but at a low level of com-plexity and human habitability” (Leopold [1939] 1991a, p. 270, emphasis mine). He understood the importance of plant succession, although he did not subscribe to Cle-ments’s climactic climax succession, and appreciated the tension between ecological competition and cooperation (Warren 2016, pp. 185–191). Indeed, Leopold interpreted competition and cooperation in a human community through ethics: “[An individual’s] instincts prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate…” (Leopold 1949, pp. 203–204). Other concepts inspired by Elton’s work include consideration of habitat quality, carrying capacity (Sayre 2008), and limiting factors (Flader [1974] 1994, p. 118) in estimating wildlife populations (Temple 1999, p. 47). Toward the end of his life Leopold focuses on the capacity of land to recover, or land health (Leopold [1946] 1999; see Sect. 4.3.2).
Leopold’s wildlife research centered on wildlife popula-tion cycles (Leopold 1945; Leopold et al. 1947, 1943) and phenology (Leopold and Jones 1947). This research was facilitated by a network of collaborators and research sites, which included the aforementioned university arboretum, Riley farms, Faville Grove, Coon Creek, and his shack property, as well as research sites at Prairie du Sac in Sauk County (Kohler 2011; Meine 2010, pp. 288, 374), Elkhorn in Walworth County (Meine 2010, p. 374), and Delta Duck Station in Manitoba, Canada (pp. 384–387).28 Leopold and his collaborators collected data through questioning people on the ground (students, farmers, game wardens, sportsmen, and technical field men), questionnaires, correspondences, relying on the recollections of respondents, as well as histor-ical records (Leopold 1945). For ornithological research the methods were conducting census and the trapping, weighing, and banding of birds (Leopold et al. 1943). This intensive or “residential” field research is linked to international net-works of ecological knowledge that focused on population cycles (Jones 2017; Kohler 2011). In the 1940s Leopold shifted toward population biology, arguing for more rigorous methods by studying wildlife populations in terms of age and sex classes, and using the data to mathematically esti-mate the time taken to extinguish a generation of a species (Leopold 1947).29 It is important to note that some aspects of Leopold’s science in “The Land Ethic” are outdated or inac-curate, e.g., he conflated matter and energy in his description
of energy flows through the land pyramid. Apparently Leo-pold had not read the trophic principles recently developed by Lindeman (1942).
Leopold’s student and assistant Robert McCabe taught in Leopold’s department and wrote a hagiographic recol-lection of Leopold (McCabe 1987). His collection of Leo-pold’s papers are preserved at the UW-Madison Libraries. Leopold’s position in wildlife management at UW-Madison was later held by Stanley Temple, who has written about Leopold’s contribution to wildlife conservation (Temple 1999). Temple’s student, conservation biologist and ecolo-gist Richard Knight (1996; 2002; 2009), has also written about Leopold’s legacy.
Needless to say, the science of ecology has evolved since Leopold’s time. In analyzing Leopold’s ecological thinking using today’s thinking or nomenclature, we are already removed from Leopold’s ideas. Subsequent scien-tific research related to Leopold mostly revisited topics that Leopold had written about, e.g., the Kaibab deer herd (Bin-kley et al. 2006) and Germany’s Dauerwald or permanent forest concept (Schabel 2001), or related Leopold’s writings to scientific paradigms, e.g., ecosystem management (Cal-licott 2000; Flader 1994; Knight 1996), ecosystem health (Callicott 1992; Lin and Fyles 2015), and resilience (Berkes et al. 2012).
Leopold has been identified as a pioneer in restoration ecology through his restoration work at the university arbo-retum and his shack property (Meine 2017b; Palmer et al. 2016, p. 15). Inspired by Leopold, Apfelbaum and Haney (2010) discussed methods of restoration of ecological health in a way that is accessible to private landowners. Leopold contributed significantly to phenology, the study of the tim-ing of natural events and phenomena. Comparing Leopold’s record of spring events at the shack from 1936 to 1947 with daughter Nina Leopold Bradley’s record from 1976 to 1998 reveals an overall increase in phenological earliness at the site, reflecting climate change in Wisconsin (Bradley et al. 1999). Similarly, referencing historical phenological data collected by Leopold in Wisconsin and David Henry Tho-reau in Massachusetts, record-breaking spring temperatures in Wisconsin in 2012 and in Massachusetts in 2010 and 2012 were found to result in the earliest flowering times in history for dozens of spring-flowering plants (Ellwood et al. 2013).
4.3.2 Land health
Leopold developed the concept of “land health” over the last decade of his life (Leopold [1944] 1991, [1946] 1999; Meine 2010, pp. 368–370, 404–405; Warren 2016, pp. 316–350). While Leopold used his biotic view of land as a “mental image of land” to help readers understand the impact of human actions (1949, p. 214; [1939] 1991a, p. 267), he increasingly used land health to characterize the
28 For a discussion of the shared conservation history of Canada and the USA, see Sandlos (2013).29 For a contemporary review of ecology, see Allee et al. (1949, pp. 1–72).
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overall objective of conservation. In earlier works Leopold described the state of land in the negative, using terms such as abnormal ([1924] 1991a, pp. 115, 118, 122), deranged or derangement ([1938] 1991, p. 250; [1939] 1991b, p. 257), sickness ([1935] 1991c, p. 228), symptoms ([1935] 1991b, p. 217), and pathology ([1935] 1991b). In many cases he was describing the problem of soil erosion and watershed function.
Leopold’s use of land health in the more positive sense was sparked by his two hunting trips in 1936 to 1938 to the Sierra Madre Occidental in Mexico, which he described as possessing “ecological health” ([1937] 1991, p. 239). Leo-pold was more circumspect in the 1947 foreword to ASCA: “It was here that I first clearly realized that land is an organ-ism, that all my life I had seen only sick land, whereas here was a biota still in perfect aboriginal health” ([1947] 1987, pp. 285–286). Leopold’s concept of land health was influ-enced by the organismic model of ecology that compared the collective functioning of living plants and animals and their environment to the self-regulation and maintenance of an organism. It took shape during “a Depression-era cli-mate of crisis and instability, a neo-Hippocratic revival in medicine that strengthened the links between pathology and physiology, and a more widespread concern for stabilizing and increasing the productivity of nature’s economy” (Mit-man 2005, p. 189).
In his last major draft on the land health concept, Leo-pold concluded that land health refers to the “capacity for self-renewal in the biota” ([1946] 1999, p. 219) and pro-posed four conditions for “the perpetuation of the biotic self-renewal or land-health” (p. 220): ensure the integrity of land by not exterminating any species; avoid “violence” in land use such as large-scale engineering or use of poisons; “stabilization of our [population] density”; and recognize that “the biota is beautiful collectively and in all its parts” so land use decisions needs to be based on both aesthetic and economic grounds (pp. 221–226).
4.3.3 Land aesthetic
Leopold’s consideration of the land aesthetic (spelled “esthetic” in his writings) or the “beauty” of the land is grounded in “the integrity of its evolutionary heritage and ecological processes” (Callicott 2008, p. 109). For exam-ple, Leopold was concerned about whether species were naturally bred in situ and developed into healthy popula-tions as a result of favorable habitats or bred and maintained through artificial means, such as the artificial feeding of deer he observed in Germany (Leopold 1936b). Knowledge of a species’ evolutionary background and its role in the biotic community transforms seemingly mundane or economically unproductive land, such as marshlands, into sites of evolu-tionary or ecological significance. This is exemplified in the
essay “Marshland Elegy,” in which Leopold noted the evolu-tionary significance of cranes and the importance of preserv-ing isolated marshlands devoid of roads (1949, pp. 95–104). In “Thinking Like a Mountain” Leopold showed how pre-serving the land’s aesthetic character, achieved in this case through preservation of top predators such as wolves and bears, verges on the noumenal dimension (pp. 129–137).
The key to appreciating land aesthetic is to develop “the perception of the natural processes by which the land and the living things upon it have achieved their characteristic forms (evolution) and by which they maintain their existence (ecol-ogy)” (Leopold 1949, p. 173). Leopold felt that aside from a sense of husbandry, developing this perception through nature study was the most meaningful and least destructive form of outdoor recreation (pp. 165–177). This perception is accessible to everyone and applicable to all forms of wild-ness, be it “weeds in a city lot” or a farmer’s cow-pasture; “he who has a little may use it to as good advantage as he who has much” (p. 174). Developing perception to land aes-thetic is important to conservation because it reveals the evo-lutionary and ecological intricacies of land and expands the perspective of society to the “incredible sweep of millennia” (p. 96), hopefully inspiring introspection, humility, and cur-tailment of economic expediency and any resulting destruc-tive land practices. Nurturing this capacity for perception was Leopold’s primary aim as an educator (Orr 1999).30
4.4 Conservation philosophy
4.4.1 Wilderness
One of Leopold’s main objectives of conservation is the pres-ervation of wilderness and wildlife. Wilderness was important to Leopold for historical, recreational, and scientific reasons (Warren 2008). Preserving tracts of wilderness, including unknown places, and wildlife in general enable people to explore and engage in outdoor recreation, which Leopold felt was important for preserving a historical sense of American identity (Leopold 1949, pp. 177–201). In his proposal for a wilderness policy area in the Forest Service, Leopold defined wilderness as “a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks’ pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man” ([1921] 1991, p. 79). When Leopold was developing land health later in his life, he noted the “need of wilderness as a base-datum for
30 “I am trying to teach you that this alphabet of ‘natural objects’ (soils and rivers, birds and beasts) spells out a story, which he who runs may read—if he knows how. Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you” (Leopold [1947] 1991b, p. 337).
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problems of land-health” ([1941] 1991b, p. 287) and called for representative tracts of all biomes to be preserved (p. 289). Finally, Leopold felt that society should protect wildness and wilderness for its spiritual ([1924] 1991c; [1925] 1991; Vest 1987) and intrinsic value (1949, pp. 95–101).
4.4.2 Perception of land
In his adulthood Leopold did not espouse any formal reli-gion.31 In late 1947 daughter Estella Jr. found an opportune time to ask Leopold whether he believed in God. Estella recalled: “He replied that he believed there was a mystical supreme power that guided the Universe….But to him this power was not a personalized God. It was more akin to the laws of nature….His religion came from nature…” This was corroborated by son Luna: “The organization of the universe was enough to take the place of God….the wonders of nature were, of course, objects of admiration and satisfaction to him.” (Meine 2010, pp. 506–507)
Leopold’s fascination with the wonders of nature driven by a mystical supreme power explained his application of Ouspensky’s concept of noumenon to the land: “A philos-opher has called this imponderable essence the numenon [sic] of material things” (1949, p. 138, emphasis in original). Noumenon stands in contrast to phenomenon which we can straightforwardly perceive. Leopold borrowed the concept of noumenon from the Russian philosopher-mystic P.D. Ous-pensky (1878–1947), who used it in his 1912 book Tertium Organum which was later translated into English (Callicott 2014, pp. 161–164; Ouspensky 1920; Pryor 2011).32,33
4.4.3 Individual responsibility, ecological conscience, and land ethic
As noted earlier, in 1933 Leopold delivered “Conservation Ethic” in New Mexico while he was advising on soil ero-sion in the southwest. Leopold called for the extension of ethics to land to ensure stability in human-land relationship, discussed the important role of ecology, particularly soil science and plant succession, to human history, the threat that runaway economic development posed to land, and the growing conservation movement ([1933] 1991).
Leopold’s conservation philosophy continued to evolve after “Conservation Ethic” and was informed by his engage-ment in conservation projects, not least his disappointment at the failure of private land owners to protect public inter-est on their lands on their own accord. While remaining a staunch and lifelong defender of public lands, Leopold’s conservation philosophy gradually became less utilitarian and less anthropocentric and centered on the development of individual responsibility for the health of the land (see Sect. 4.3.2), as seen in his conservation program quoted at the beginning of this review and in “The Land Ethic” essay (1949, pp. 201–226). He concluded that conservation would be most ideal and viable in the long term if it were driven by intrinsic positive inducements of individuals and groups, as compared to conservation solely through governmental or economic means, which were often perceived as negative restraint. In other words, Leopold was thinking that cultiva-tion of ecological conscience and land ethic in people will compel them to engage in the positive exercise of what he variously called “husbandry of wild plants and animals,” “husbandry-in-the-wild,” or “wild husbandry”34 (1949, pp. 159, 175, 184) and contribute to land health. Leopold’s Jef-fersonian idea of the landowner upholding the public’s inter-est by practicing conservation on his land was expressed in “The Farmer as a Conservationist”:
Doesn’t conservation imply a certain interspersion of land-uses, a certain pepper-and-salt pattern in the warp and woof of the land-use fabric? If so, can government alone do the weaving? I think not.It is the individual farmer who must weave the greater part of the rug on which America stands. Shall he weave
31 Leopold would consent to enter a church only on rare occasions, his own marriage being one. As a parent Leopold did not say a word on the subject of religion. Even though he hid his doubts about the Church for the most part, his children could sense that he took a dim view of it (Meine 2010, p. 376).32 “Noumenal means apprehended by the mind; and the character-istic property of the things of the noumenal world is that they can-not be comprehended by the same method by which the things of the phenomenal world are comprehended. We may speculate about the things of the noumenal world; we may discover them by a process of reasoning, and by means of analogy; we may feel them, and enter into some sort of communion with them; but we can neither see, hear, touch, weigh, measure them; nor can we photograph them or decom-pose them into chemical elements or number their vibrations. The noumenal world, or the world of causes, is for us the world of meta-physical facts” (Ouspensky 1920, p. 181, italics in original). Leopold was too generous in his interpretation of Ouspensky’s book, attribut-ing planetary temporal and spatial scales and hierarchical organiza-tion of different parts of the earth to it (Callicott 2014, pp. 161–162).33 Leopold identified the key species of a particular location that sig-nifies its noumenon, noting that “the grouse is the numenon [sic] of the north woods, the blue jay of the hickory groves, the whisky jack of the muskegs, the piñonero of the juniper foothills,” the bear of the Escudilla Mountain in Arizona, and the Thick-billed Parrot of the Sierra Madre Occidental in Mexico (1949, pp. 133–141), and used the music metaphor to describe the noumenon of the hills of the Rio Gavilan (pp. 149–150).
34 On husbandry, Leopold wrote: “Government can’t raise crops, maintain small scattered structures, administer small scattered areas, or bring to bear on small local matters that combination of solicitude, foresight, and skill which we call husbandry. Husbandry watches no clock, knows no season of cessation, and for the most part is paid for in love, not dollars” (Leopold [1942] 1991, p. 298).
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into it only the sober yarns which warm the feet, or also some of the colors which warm the eye and the heart?…is the individual farmer capable of dedicating private land to uses which profit the community, even though they may not so clearly profit him? We may be over-hasty in assuming that he is not. (Leopold [1939] 1991b, p. 260)
Leopold’s focus on individual responsibility was partly influenced by the prevailing fear of socialism and commu-nism in American society in the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, his close associates prodded him about the direction he was tak-ing in his writings.35 Worster (1994b, p. 85) suggested that in the 1930s Leopold became increasingly critical of American individualism that championed self-interest at the expense of the community, prompting Leopold to try to redirect the indi-vidual’s focus toward the community in “The Land Ethic.”
Although Leopold is most well known for his land ethic, ironically Leopold rarely used the term in his life, using it in an unpublished discussion on “The Farm Foundation and Land Conservation” which included a section titled “Eth-ics of Land-Use” (c.1934, pp. 2, 5),36 a lecture titled “Land Pathology” ([1935] 1991b, p. 215), and “The Land Ethic” essay (1949, pp. 204, 210, 213, 221, 223–225). However, his thinking on ethical land relations that should under-pin land-use decisions was elaborated in “The Ecological Conscience” (Leopold [1947] 1991a), a major address he delivered while completing the manuscript of ASCA (see Sect. 2.4.3). It was clear in its introduction that Leopold was inventing new terms and that “ecological conscience” and “ethic” are similar if not equivalent:
I need a short name for what is lacking; I call it the ecological conscience. Ecology is the science of com-munities, and the ecological conscience is therefore the ethics of community life. (Leopold [1947] 1991a, p. 340)
Leopold defined the land ethic in a similar way: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land” (Leopold 1949, p. 204). While noting that the land ethic is “a product of social evolution” (Leopold 1949, p. 225), Leopold was so profoundly moved by the need for con-servation that he included an injunction which spoke most directly to private landowners, and which I refer to as the commonly cited statement here.
4.4.4 Environmental ethics
Leopold’s land ethic, “a phrase which catches the spirit” (Egler 1989, p. 99), has stimulated discussion since the early years of environmental ethics (Brennan and Lo 2016; Cal-licott 1993; Kawall 2015),37 with J. Baird Callicott being only its most prominent exponent.38
4.4.4.1 J. Baird Callicott’s interpretation: Darwinian ethi‑cal holism and evolutionary‑ecological worldview Calli-cott developed through an extensive series of publications a theoretical framework for the land ethic, giving it a base on which scholars can debate its merits (Callicott 1987b, p. 187). His most up-to-date interpretation of ASCA and the land ethic can be found in his book Thinking Like a Planet (Callicott 2014). He identifies the unifying theme of ASCA as “the exposition and promulgation of an evolutionary-ecological worldview and its axiological (ethical and aes-thetical) and normative (practical moral) implications” and observes that “Leopold’s bold project in [ASCA] is nothing short of worldview remediation.”39 (Callicott 2014, p. 21)
35 Leopold was warned by former student Douglas Wade (1944) about the subtle inclinations to socialization he displayed in a cou-ple of articles published in The Audubon Magazine (Leopold [1942] 1991, p. 298; Leopold [1944] 2013).36 This occurrence of Leopold’s “land ethic” was identified by War-ren (2016, p. 149), although she cites it as part of an accompanying letter.
37 Making the case for a new, an environmental, ethic, Richard Syl-van ([1973] 2001) noted that Leopold’s prescription for extending tra-ditional morality to include land is inadequate because an ethic that is embedded in the Western super ethic of human dominion over the environment and of the liberal tradition of not causing harm to human others and to oneself would be ineffectual in preventing environ-mental harm. Sylvan’s assessment suggests he overlooked Leopold’s statement about how “a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it” (Leopold 1949, p. 204). In the first article on environmental ethics in Ethics Rolston (1975) interpreted Leopold’s land ethic as calling for the preservation of integrity of ecosystems and used it to introduce the idea of “ecological ethics,” or ethics that are thoroughly informed by ecological principles. Rolston indicated the novelty of the ecological turn in philosophy during the 1960s and 1970s when he discussed the arresting novelty of “ecological conscience”: “The puzzlement lies neither in the noun nor in the by now familiar modi-fier, but in their operation on each other. We are comfortable with a Christian or humanist ethic, but the moral noun does not regularly take a scientific adjective…” (1975, p. 93).38 Callicott taught what appeared to be the first environmental phi-losophy course in the USA (Callicott 1987a, p. vii).39 According to Callicott (2014, p. 46), “…‘The Land Ethic’ is the crowning part—the capstone essay, the climax, the denouement. The land ethic represents the axiological (ethical and aesthetical) and nor-mative (practical moral) implications of an evolutionary-ecological worldview, which is gradually exposed and promulgated in the pre-ceding parts of the book. In [ASCA]’s Part I, readers are introduced to an evolutionary-ecological worldview—circumspectly and indirectly through narrative description, vicarious sensory experience, and imaginative engagement. In [ASCA]’s Part II, readers are introduced to an evolutionary-ecological worldview also by means of narrative accounts of the author’s experience on his own journey of discovery and conversion, but more directly, more urgently, and certainly more confrontationally than in Part I.” See also Callicott (2005); Callicott (2011); Callicott (2012).
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Callicott has published numerous articles about Leopold, some of which have been anthologized in two volumes (1989; 1999b). His work, in turn, has been discussed exten-sively by other scholars (e.g., Ouderkirk and Hill 2002).
Callicott interprets Leopold’s mention of “struggle of existence” and other terms related to evolution (Leopold 1949, p. 202) as alluding to “Darwinian evolution as the con-ceptual context in which a biological account of the origin and development of ethics must ultimately be located” (Cal-licott 1987b, pp. 188–189; see also Callicott 2001, p. 205; Callicott 2014, pp. 46–57).40 According to Callicott (2001), Leopold’s thinking about the evolution of ethics was mainly informed by Charles Darwin’s account of the same topic in The Descent of Man (Darwin [1871] 2009). Further, the moral sentiments of David Hume and Adam Smith provide the foundation of ethics in Darwin’s evolutionary expansion of ethics from close kin to a broader community (Callicott 1987b, pp. 190–191; Callicott 2014, pp. 55–58).41 Provid-ing a more ecological interpretation, Millstein (2015) sug-gests that Leopold’s land ethic is based on interdependencies within biological communities which exist in counterpoint to the struggle for existence, and which Darwin discussed in On the Origin of Species (Darwin and Costa [1859] 2009).
The community concept in ecology feature prominently in Leopold’s concept of a land ethic: “…a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-com-munity to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such” (1949, p. 204). The land ethic’s holistic concern for the land community sets it apart from mainstream moral theories, which focus on individual human beings or ani-mals. Callicott interprets Leopold as showing concern for species and not individual specimens and observes that his land ethic is better received by professional conservation-ists than professional philosophers (Callicott 2001, pp. 204, 208–210; Callicott 2014, pp. 61–64). Callicott has updated the commonly cited statement in light of contemporary ecological understanding: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the beauty of the biotic community and to disturb
it only at normal spatial and temporal scales. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” (Callicott 2014, p. 97; see also Callicott 2002)
Callicott became so closely associated with the land ethic that shortcomings of the former’s interpretation were taken to be flaws of the latter. Callicott’s (1980) early interpreta-tion of the holism of the land ethic entailed subordination of individual well-being to the greater good of the collec-tive whole, which led Regan (1983, p. 362) to condemn the land ethic as “environmental fascism.”42 The pernicious fas-cist charge prompted Leopold’s son Luna Leopold (1987) to defend Leopold’s personal character and conservation philosophy.43 Callicott subsequently revised his interpreta-tion, noting that Leopold (1949, p. 202) described “accre-tions” of ethical relations and therefore adopting a land ethic does not abrogate older and more intimate ethical obliga-tions to human individuals and groups (Callicott 1987b, pp. 206–209; Callicott 1999c, p. 71). Nelson (1996) has care-fully analyzed “The Land Ethic” essay, noting among other nuances that inclusion of “land” into the moral community does not automatically imply that previous members had to be excluded (p. 111). Nevertheless, the fascist charge occa-sionally resurfaces (e.g., Salwén 2014).
Notwithstanding provocative remarks by the early Calli-cott, the charge of environmental fascism is symptomatic of an excessive focus on the commonly cited statement, a pen-chant for “isms” and summary characterizations, and a dis-inclination to read ASCA in its entirety (much less Leopold’s other writings) to develop a comprehensive and contextualized
40 In their interpretation of the Darwinian context of the land ethic, Callicott (1987b, pp. 188–189; 2001, p. 205) and Norton (2005, pp. 69–70) refer to these sentences in “The Land Ethic”: “This extension of ethics, so far studied only by philosophers, is actually a process in ecological evolution. Its sequences may be described in ecologi-cal as well as in philosophical terms. An ethic, ecologically, is a limi-tation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation” (Leopold 1949, p. 202).41 For criticisms of and improvements on Callicott’s analysis of Hume’s ideas as foundation of Leopold’s land ethic, see Welchman (2009) and references therein.
42 It is easy to see from Callicott’s early writing why Regan levied this serious charge: “The preciousness of individual deer, as of any other specimen, is inversely proportional to the population of the spe-cies. Environmentalists, however reluctantly and painfully, do not omit to apply the same logic to their own kind. As omnivores, the population of human beings should, perhaps, be roughly twice that of bears, allowing for differences of size. A global population of more than four billion persons and showing no signs of an orderly decline presents an alarming prospect to humanists, but it is at present a global disaster (the more per capita prosperity, indeed, the more dis-astrous it appears) for the biotic community” (Callicott 1980, p. 326).43 Luna wrote:…These extreme extrapolations pay no heed to Leopold’s deep con-cern for his aging mother. They do not reflect the fact that he always avoided putting anyone in an uncomfortable or embarrassing position. Never would he talk down to a person and he treated people in menial positions with the same consideration and courtesy as he would the most exalted.Rather than interpreting the concept of the land ethic as an indi-cation of disregard for the individual in favor of the species or the ecosystem, my view is quite different. I see the concept as the out-growth and extension of his deep personal concern for the individ-ual. Accepting the idea that the cooperations and competitions in the human society are eased and facilitated by concern for others, he saw that the same consideration extended to other parts of the ecosystem and would tend to add integrity, beauty, and stability to the whole. Leopold (1987, p. viii).
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understanding of his thinking. Further, the fascist charge of the land ethic assumes that in the ethical calculation of humans a dualism between the environment and humans exist and that humans are incapable of protecting the welfare of both humans and the rest of the environment (in which human are embed-ded) at the same time. Indeed, Leopold wrote the “The Land Ethic” on the premise that we humans possess a unique abil-ity to think, care, and extend moral sympathies before acting, instead of acting only out of instinct, which enables us to mind-fully steer the fate of human society and the environment.44
In 1979 Leopold’s manuscript “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest” ([1923] 1979; [1923] 1991b) was published for the first time in Environmental Ethics with a commentary by Flader (1979). Interpreting the manuscript as calling for deontological respect for Earth, Callicott has most recently defined an Earth ethic based on the same Darwinian-Humean foundations he had identi-fied for the land ethic. Callicott’s Earth ethic is grounded in humans’ care for their personal relations and global civi-lization (2014, pp. 288–302). Callicott was not the first to ground a global ethic in Leopold’s work. Biochemist and oncologist Van Rensselaer Potter (1988, pp. 152–153) had earlier proposed a “global bioethics” as “a secular program of evolving a morality that calls for decisions in health care and in the preservation of the natural environment.”
4.4.4.2 Bryan G. Norton’s pragmatist interpretation Bryan G. Norton, who studies philosophy in a public policy con-text, proposed a contrasting interpretation of Leopold’s thinking (1988; 2005, pp. 65–75). Focusing on Leopold’s quoting of President of Yale University Arthur T. Had-ley’s pragmatist concept of truth, “Truth is that which pre-vails in the long run”45 in “Some Fundamentals” (Leopold [1923] 1991b) as well as his Darwinian approach to ethics in “The Land Ethic” essay,40 Norton concluded that Leo-pold “adopt[ed] a Darwinian approach to evaluating cultural institutions and practices in terms of their contribution to
the multigenerational survival of a culture.” (2005, p. 71) Accordingly, Leopold’s conservation task was “developing institutions that are stable enough to perpetuate our current social values, including love of nature, and at the same time flexible enough to respond to rapid change both in culture and especially in the ecological context of cultures,” which makes his work one of adaptive management (pp. 72–73).46 Other scholars have also discussed Leopold’s thinking from a pragmatist perspective (Minteer 2006; Wildermuth 2002).
While “Some Fundamentals” is a milestone in Leopold’s thinking, it was written before Leopold moved to Wisconsin, where his ecological thinking matured. Research based on “Some Fundamentals” should also refer to his later writings.
Given Leopold’s unusual breadth and influence, it is not surprising that scholars have interpreted Leopold in different ways, depending on their perspectives and research objec-tives (e.g., Budolfson 2014; Dixon 2016, 2017). Some philo-sophical analysis focuses on Leopold’s terms of art in the commonly cited statement, e.g., “integrity” (Westra 1994), or other key terms, e.g., “community” (Millstein 2018b) and “interdependence” (Millstein 2018c). Other terms that have been analyzed, philosophically or otherwise, include “Green Fire” (Caputi 2011), “Thinking Like a Mountain” (Van Horn 2011), and “Round River” (Dicks 2014). Leopold’s work has been discussed from the perspective of ecofeminism (Norlock 2011; O’Shea 2018; Warren 2000, pp. 147–174) and continental philosophy (Callicott et al. 2011b). Millstein (2018a) observed that over time misconceptions about the land ethic have developed, e.g., the tendency by scholars to reduce it to the commonly cited statement.
4.5 Cultural references and ecocriticism
In his writings Leopold referred often to biblical and Greek mythology in direct relation to American society, revealing the potency of Western mythology and his desire to address the cultural roots of the conservation problem (Leopold 1949, pp. viii, 201–203). He also occasionally invoked the caricature of Babbitt, the eponymous character of a satiri-cal novel by American author Sinclair Lewis (1922). So apt and resonating was Lewis’s portrayal that “Babbitt” came to represent the archetype of the middle-aged businessman and booster whose eagerness to being perceived as a solid citizen led him to become conforming, hypocritical, and superficial (Hines 1967; Love 1993).47 In Leopold’s writings “Babbitt”
44 “And if there be, indeed, a special nobility inherent in the human race—a special cosmic value, distinctive from and superior to all other life—by what token shall it be manifest? By a society decently respectful of its own and all other life, capable of inhabiting the earth without defiling it? Or by a society like that of John Burroughs’ potato bug, which exterminated the potato, and thereby exterminated itself?” (Leopold [1923] 1991b, p. 97).45 Norton (1988, p. 95) surmised that Leopold was exposed to Had-ley (1913) through a review in the Yale Review, which Leopold regularly read according to biographer Meine (Norton 1988, en 3). Indeed, the line that Leopold misquoted, replacing “right” with “truth,” appeared in the review: “[The force of the scientific discover-ies] has even given us the basis, says Mr. Hadley, of ‘a new spiritual philosophy of life.’ For the scientific man to-day ‘believes, as the very essence of his theory, that the right is that which will prevail in the long run.’ The adoption of this hypothesis is the most important mark of distinction between us and our fathers” (Sherman 1914, p. 385).
46 Norton and Callicott have sparred over whether Leopold was influ-enced by pragmatist philosophy (Callicott 2014, pp. 171–177; Calli-cott et al. 2009; Callicott et al. 2011a; Norton 2011; Stephens 2018).47 The name has entered the lexicon of the English-speaking world, an example dictionary definition being “a person likened to the char-acter George Babbitt, esp. a materialistic, complacent businessman who conforms unthinkingly to the views and standards of his social set” (Oxford English Dictionary Online 2019).
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was portrayed as being insensitive toward conservation and ecological thinking. Commenting on the possibility of using economic tools to encourage conservation, Leopold wrote: “if we want Mr. Babbitt to rebuild outdoor America, we must let him use the same tools wherewith he destroyed it. He knows no other” ([1932] 1991, p. 166). Other American cultural references in Leopold’s writings include John Bur-roughs (Leopold [1923] 1991b, p. 97), John Muir (Leopold 1949, pp. 15, 29), Thoreau (Leopold 1949, p. 133), Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Pulitzer-winning poem Tristram (Car-penter 1938; Joyner 1980; Leopold 1949, p. 223; Robinson 1927), and Emerson, from whose essay on “Civilization” Leopold quoted “hitched his wagon to a star” (Leopold 1949, p. 3).
As Leopold matured, his writings became more engaging and skillful. The letters that Leopold wrote home, which began when he left for Lawrenceville School (Low 2011), enabled him to hone his epistolary skills and share his out-door observations. Over his career “the condensed essay was his preferred and perfected medium of expression” (Flader and Callicott 1991, p. 3). He sometimes ended his essays somewhat stridently with a vivid and thought-provoking image to drive home his point. For example, Leopold ended “Conservation Ethic” with “[t]he stampede is an attribute of animals interested solely in grass” ([1933b] 1991, p. 192) and the last two sentences of “The Land Ethic” and hence of ASCA are “We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam shovel, and we are proud of our yardage. We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many good points, but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use.” (Leopold 1949, p. 226). Youthful wonder and imagination endured in Leopold’s writings throughout his life: “Books or no books, it is a fact, patent both to my dog and myself, that at daybreak I am the sole owner of all the acres I can walk over” (Leopold 1949, p. 41).
Literary scholars have studied ASCA and other writings by Leopold, explaining its characteristics and its perennial and forceful appeal, as well as interpreting its deeper mean-ing. Fritzell ([1976] 1987) was one of the first scholars to critically analyze ASCA. Tallmadge (1987) gave an insight-ful account on the “Anatomy of a Classic” which influenced Callicott’s analysis of the land ethic and ASCA. Writer Wal-lace Stegner gave high praise to ASCA, describing it as a biblical work for our present-day “forming civilization” (Stegner 1987, p. 233).
Barillas discussed ASCA from a midwestern pastoral per-spective, noting that Leopold’s “special contribution to mid-western pastoral literature, and to American nature writing as a whole, would be the conjoining of modern ecological
science with the Romantic spirit of place” (1996; 2006, p. 86). Scholars have analyzed Leopold’s use of rhetoric (St. Maurice 2014; Willard 2007) and how his dialogue with the landscape and embodied forms of knowing can lead us away from our current individualist and anthropocentric orienta-tion (Rogers 2003).
4.6 Land use policy
While Leopold began his career in the Forest Service with the mandate of protecting the public’s interest in the national forests, his quasi-official work on game management caused him to gradually broaden his focus to seek the same end on private lands. In Wisconsin his vision expanded to include preserving wilderness and promoting wildlife and land health on private lands. Eric Frefogle has written extensively about the challenges of pursuing conservation in the context of private ownership and individualism in American culture (2003, 2006, 2017a).
Given his prior employment by the Forest Service, Leo-pold’s writings have prompted some US government offi-cials in charge of public lands to reflect on their work (Pister 1987; Thomas 2002; Udall 1963). One of the obvious chal-lenges Leopold posed to them is examining their position in relation to the “A-B cleavage”: “one group (A) regards the land as soil, and its function as commodity production; another group (B) regards the land as a biota, and its func-tion as something broader” (Leopold 1949, p. 221; Pister 2002). The Forest Service evolved in response to changes in scientific paradigms and societal expectations (which were due in part to the influence of ASCA and other classic envi-ronmental texts), such that management of the national for-ests has shifted from custodial management (1905–1945), to production of wood products (1945–1985), and afterward to the still-evolving paradigm of ecosystem management (Mac-Cleery 2008). Leopold’s philosophy of land conservation continues to inspire local land practices (e.g., Van Auken 2020).
After a debate initiated by Coufal (1989) about whether the Society of American Foresters (SAF) should include a land ethic canon in the SAF Code of Ethics, a majority of SAF members voted on November 2, 1992, to amend the Code to that effect (Smyth 1995). However, divergent sets of interpretation of Leopold’s land ethic meant that foresters were unable to derive clear guidance from it (Proctor 1996). On November 3, 2000, the members voted to adopt a new code that replaced the vague language of the land ethic with explicit land ethical principles to provide greater clarity and guidance (Radcliffe 2000).
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4.7 Conservation economics
Leopold displayed a lucid understanding of the role of eco-nomics in conservation. During his time in the Southwest Leopold ([1923] 1991a, [1924] 1991b) witnessed the deg-radation of land and corruption of civic consciousness as a result of the pursuit of economic growth and profits. While advising on New Deal conservation projects in the South-west, Leopold questioned in “The Conservation Ethic” the viability of public ownership of lands: “We cannot dodge the fact that the forest problem, like the soil problem, is coextensive with the map of the United States. How far can we tax other lands and industries to maintain forest lands and industries artificially?” ([1933] 1991, p. 187) A year later in “Conservation Economics” he explained the only way to ensure the future physical integrity of the country is “the conservative use of every acre on every watershed in America, whether it be farm or forest, public or private.” ([1934] 1991b, p. 196, emphasis in original) His central message prefigured his land ethic ideas:
The thing to be prevented is destructive private land-use of any and all kinds. The thing to be encouraged is the use of private land in such a way as to combine the public and the private interest to the greatest possible degree. If we are going to spend large sums of public money anyhow, why not use it to subsidize desirable combinations in land use, instead of to cure, by pur-chase, prohibition, or repair, the headache arising from bad ones? (Leopold [1934] 1991b, p. 200)
Leopold’s astute economic sense of conservation was the result of his experience in land administration in the Forest Service, his appointment in the University’s Department of Agricultural Economics, which was made in anticipa-tion of his contribution to solving the issue of land utility in Wisconsin’s cutover lands (Flader 2011, p. 52; Haswell and Alanen 1995), his recognition of the “economic Jugger-naut” of development (Leopold [1932] 1991, p. 166), and, last but not least, the piquant fact that his shack property was reverted to the state because the last owners, Jacob and Emma Alexander, abandoned it with unpaid taxes (Leopold 2016, pp. 6–8). At the department he worked closely with land economist George Wehrwein (Meine 2010, pp. 322, 387) and was familiar with agrarian intellectuals’ coopera-tive land use programs, such as the soil conservation dis-tricts, during the later stage of the New Deal (Gilbert 2015; Leopold [1942] 1991). From 1934 to 1938 he drafted four research prospectuses for a conservation economics project and in 1947 attempted to persuade the university to hire Wil-liam Vogt in an “ecological economics” position (Lin 2014). In these proposals Leopold sought to reorient human con-sumption of natural resources along ecological principles.
5 Legacy
Leopold’s “particular genius was an ever-expanding inti-macy with [the natural] world” (Meine 2010, p. 162). This genius, developed since his youth through keen observation, indulgence in history and explorers’ adventures, and pas-sion for wilderness, outdoor recreation, and land steward-ship, compelled him to question the march of “progress” in society and the profound land modification and profound implications for social well-being it had engendered.
Written in his concise and moving prose, ASCA repre-sents Leopold’s distillation of a lifetime of experience and reflection on the land. He sought solutions to inculcate ecologically informed conservative land use in society, as evidenced by the concepts he developed: conservation eco-nomics, land aesthetic, ecological conscience, land ethic, land health. Together these concepts comprise a landmark attempt to cultivate an intense consciousness of land in soci-ety. Perhaps owing to the fact that the economic and political forces that separate society from the land have intensified since Leopold’s death, and notwithstanding certain parochial aspects of his thinking, these ideas continue to remind us of the profound transformation that society needs to undergo to renew and sustain itself and the planet’s life-supporting systems.
Acknowledgements I thank Wei-Ning Xiang, the editor-in-chief of Socio-Ecological Practice Research, for giving me the opportunity to write this review, Curt Meine for his helpful comments, William Rees and Richard Norgaard for permission to share their experience with Aldo Leopold, and Vincent Wong at the Nanyang Technological Uni-versity Library for assistance with the cited reference search of ASCA.
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Lin Qi Feng received his PhD from the Department of Natural Resources Sciences at McGill University and Master’s degree from the Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. He is currently research-ing on Aldo Leopold as a post-doctoral fellow at the History Programme at Nanyang Techno-logical University, Singapore. His publications include articles on Aldo Leopold, climate change, and Singapore’s environment.
