ASAND COUNTY

ALMANACWith Essays on Conservation from Round River

ALDO LEOPOLD

Illustrated by Charles W. Schwartz

A SIERRA CLUB/BALLANTINE BOOKAn Inte~t Publisher

GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT is made tothe editors of the following magazines and journalswho have kindly allowed to be reprin~d in bookform portions or·· all of individual articles: AmericanForests, 'Marshland Elegy,' 'The Green Lagoons,' and'Flambeau'; Audubon Magazine, 'Odyssey'; BirdLore, 'Conservation Esthetic'; The Condor, 'TheThick Billed Parrot of Chihuahua'; Journal ofForestry, 'The Conservation Ethic'; Journal of Wild­life Management, 'Wildlife in American Culture' and'Song of the Gavilan'; The Land, 'Cheat Takes Over';Outdoor America, 'The Alder Fork'; Silent Wings,'On a Monument to the Pigeon'; Wisconsin Agricul­turist and Farmer, 'Bur Oak' and 'Sky Dance'; Wis­consin Conservation Bulletin, 'A Mighty Fortress,''Home Range,' and 'Pines above the Snow.' Thanksare also due to The Macmillan Company for per­mission to quote from 'Tristram,' copyright 1927 byEdward Arlington Robinson, on page 239.

Copyright© 1966 by Oxford University Press, Inc.A Sand County Almanac, Copyright 1949 by OxfordUniversity Press, Inc.Round River, Copyright 1953 by Oxford UniversityPress, Inc.Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-28871

SBN 345-02007-3-095This edition published by arrangement withThe Oxford University Press.

First Printing: September, 1970Cover photograph by Ray AtkesonPrinted in the United States of America

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The Upshot

Conservation Esthetic

BARRING LOVE and war, few enterprises areundertaken with such abandon, or by such diverseindividuals, or with so paradoxical a mixture of appe­tite and altruism, as that group of avocations knownas outdoor recreation. It is, by common consent, agood thing for people to get hack to nature. Butwherein lies the goodness, and what can be done toencourage its pursuit? On these questions there isconfusion of counsel, and only the most uncriticalminds are free from doubt.

Recreation became a problem with a name in thedays of the elder Roosevelt, when the railroads whichhad banished the countryside from the city began tocarry city-.dwellers, en masse, to the countryside. Itbegan to be noticed that the greater the exodus, thesmaller the per-eapita ration of peace, solitude, wild­life, and scenery, and the longer the migration toreach them.

The automobile has spread this once mild and lo­cal predicament to the outermost limits of good roads-it has made scarce in the hinterlands somethingonce abundant on the back forty. But that somethingmust nevertheless be found. Like ions shot from the

Conservation Esthetic

sun, the week-enders radiate from every town, gen­erating heat and friction as they go. A tourist indus­try purveys bed and board to bait more ions, faster,further. Advertisements on rock and rill confide toall and sundry the whereabouts of new retreats, land­scapes, hunting-grounds, and fishing~lakes just be­yond those recently overrun. Bureaus build roads intonew hinterlands, then buy more hinterlands to ab­sorb the exodus accelerated by the roads. A gadgetindustry pads the bumps against nature-in-the-raw;woodcraft becomes the art of using gadgets. Andnow, to cap the pyramid of banalities, the trailer. Tohim who seeks in the woods and mountains onlythose things obtainable from travel or golf, the pres­ent situation is tolerable. But to him who seeks some­thing more, recreation has become a self~estructive

process of seeking but never quite finding, a majorfrustration of mecha,nized society.

The retreat of the wilderness under the barrageof motorized tourists is no local thing; Hudson Bay,Alaska, Mexico, South Africa are giving way, andSouth America and Siberia are next. Drums along theMohawk are now honks along the rivers of the world.Homo sapiens putters no more under his own vineand fig tree; he has poured into his gas tank thestored motivity of countless creatures aspiring throughthe ages to wiggle their way to pastures new. Ant­like he swarms the continents.

This is Outdoor Recreation, Latest Model.Who now is the recreationist, and what does he

seek? A few samples will remind us.

2.82 The Upshot

Take a look, first, at any duck marsh. A cordon ofparked cars surrounds it. Crouched on each point ofits reedy margin is some pillar of society, automaticready, trigger finger itching to break, if need be,every law of commonwealth or commonweal to killa duck. That he is already overfed in no way damp­ens his avidity for gathering his meat from God.

Wandering in the near-by woods is another pillar,hunting rare ferns or new warblers. Because his kindof hunting seldom calls for theft or pillage, he dis­dains the killer. Yet, like as not, in his youth he wasone.

At some near-by resort is still another nature-lover-the kind who writes bad verse on birchbark. Every­where is the unspecialized motorist whose recreationis mileage, who has run the gamut of the NationalParks in one summer, and now is headed for MexicoCity and points south.

Lastly, there is the professional, striving throughcountless conservation organizations to give thenature-seeking public what it wants, or to make itwant what he has to give.

Why, it may be asked, should such a diversity offolk be bracketed in a single category? Because each,in his own way, is a hunter. And why does each callhimself a conservationist? Because the wild things hehunts for have eluded his grasp, and he hopes bysome necromancy of laws, appropriations, regionalplans, reorganization of. departments, or other formof mass-wishing to make them stay put.

Recreation is commonly spoken of as an economicresource. Senate committees tell us, in reverent ci-

Conservation Esthetic

phers, how many millions the public spends in itspursuit. It has indeed an economic aspect-a cottageon a fishing-lake, or even a duck-point on a marsh,may cost as much as the entire adjacent farm.

It has also an ethical aspect. In the scramble forunspoiled places, codes and decalogues evolve. Wehear of 'outdoor manners.' We indoctrinate youth.We print definitions of What is a sportsman?' andhang a copy on the wall of whosOever will pay a dol­lar for the propagation of the faith.

It is clear, though, that these economic and ethicalmanifestations are results, not causes, of the motiveforce. We seek contacts with nature because we de­rive pleasure from them. As in opera, economic ma­chinery is employed to create and maintain facilities.As in opera, profeSSionals make a living out of creat­ing and maintaining them, but it would be false tosay of either that the basic motive, the raison d'etre,is economic. The duck-hunter in his blind and theoperatic singer on the stage, despite the disparity oftheir accoutrements, are doing the same thing. Eachis reviving, in play, a drama formerly inherent indaily life. Both are, in the last analysis, esthetic ex­ercises.

Public policies for outdoor recreation are contro­versial. Equally conscientious citizens hold oppositeviews on what it is and what should be done to con­serve its resource-base. Thus the Wilderness Societyseeks to exclude roads from the hinterlands, and theChamber of Commerce to extend them, both in thename of recreation. The game-farmer kills hawks and

284 The Upshot

the bird-lover protects them in the name of shotgunand field-glass hunting respectively. Such factionscommonly label each other with short and uglynames, when, in fact, each is considering a differentcomponent of the recreational process. These com­ponents differ widely in their characteristics or prop­erties. A given policy may be true for one but falsefor another.

It seems timely, therefore, to segregate the com­ponents, and to examine the distinctive characteristicsor properties of each.

We begin with the simplest and most obvious: thephysical objects that the outdoorsman may seek, find,capture, and carry away. In this category are wildcrops such as game and fish, and the symbols ortokens of achievement such as heads, hides, photo­graphs, and specimens.

All these things rest upon the idea of trophy. Thepleasure they give is, or should be, in the seeking aswell as in the getting. The trophy, whether it be abird~ egg, a mass of trout, a basket of mushrooms,the photograph ofa bear, the pressed specimen of awild Hower, or a note tucked into the cairn on amountain peak, is a certipcate. It attests that itsowner has been somewhere and done something­that he has exercised skill, persistence, or discrimina­tion in the age-old feat of overcoming, outwitting, orreducing-to-possession. These connotations which at­tach to the trophy usually far exceed its physicalvalue.

But trophies differ in their reactions to mass-pur-

fII

Conservation Esthetic 285

suit. The yield of game and nsh can, by means ofpropagation or management, be increased so as togive each hunter more, or to give more hunters thesame amount. During the past decade a professionof wildlife management has sprung into existence. Ascore of universities teach its techniques, conduct re­search for bigger and better wild animal crops. How­ever, when carried too far, this stepping-up of yieldsis subject to a law of diminishing returns. Very in­tensive management of game or fish lowers the unitvalue of the trophy by artificializing it.

Consider, for example, a trout raised in a hatcheryand newly liberated in an over-fished stream. Thestream is no longer capable of natural trout produc­tion. Pollution has fouled its waters, or deforestationand trampling have warmed or silted them. No onewould claim that this trout has the same value as awholly wild one caught out of some unmanagedstream in the high Rockies. Its esthetic connotationsare inferior, even though its capture may require skill.(Its liver, one authority says, is also so degeneratedby hatchery feeding as to forebode an early death.)Yet several over-fished states now depend almost en­tirely on such man-made trout.

All intergrades of artificiality exist, but as mass­use increases it tends to push the whole gamut ofconservation techniques toward the artificial end, andthe whole scale of trophy-values downward.

To safeguard this expensive, artificial, and more orless helpless trout, the Conservation Commission feelsimpelled to kill all herons and terns visiting the

The Upshot

hatchery where it was raised, and all mergansers andotters inhabiting the stream in which it is released.The 6sherman perhaps feels no loss in this sacri6ceof one kind of wild life for another, but the ornithol­ogist is ready to bite off ten-penny nails. Arti6cializedmanagement has, in effect, bought 6shing at the ex­pense of another and perhaps higher recreation; ithas paid dividends to one citizen out of capital stockbelonging to all. The same kind of biological wild­catting prevails in game management. In Europe;where wiHcrop statistics are available for long pe-

Conservation· Esthetic

riods, we even know the 'rate of exchange' of gamefor predators. Thus, in Saxony one hawk is killed· foreach seven game birds bagged, and one predator ofsome kind for each three head of small game.

Damage to plant life usually follows artificializedmanagement of animals-for example, damage toforests by deer. One may see this in north Germany,in northeast Pennsylvania, in the Kaibab, and indozens of other less publicized regions. In each caseover-abundant deer, when deprived of their naturalenemies, have made it impossible for deer food plantsto survive or reproduce. Beech, maple, and yew inEurope, ground hemlock and white cedar in the east­ern states, mountain mahogany and cliff-rose· in theWest, are deer foods threatened by artificialized deer.The composition of the Bora, from wild Bowers toforest trees, is gradually impoverished, and the deer

288 The Upshot

in turn are dwarfed by malnutrition. There are nostags in the woods today like those whose antlersdecorated the walls of feudal castles.

On the English heaths, reproduction of trees is in­hibited by rabbits over-protected in the process ofcropping partridges and pheasants. On scores of tropi­cal islands both Bora and fauna have been destroyedby goats introduced for meat a~d sport. It would behard to calculate the mutual injuries by and betweenmammals deprived of their natural predators, andranges stripped of their natural food plants. Agricul­tural crops caught between these upper and nethermillstones of ecological mismanagement are savedonly at the cost of endless indemnities and barbedwire.

We generalize, then, by saying that mass-use tendsto dilute the quality of organic trophies like gameand fish, and to induce damage to other resourcessuch as non-game animals, natural vegetation, andfann crops.

The same dilution and damage is not apparent inthe yield of 'indirect' trophies, such as photographs.Broadly speaking, a piece of scenery snapped by adozen tourist cameras daily is not physically im­paired thereby, nor does it suffer if photographed ahundred times. The camera industry is one of the fewinnocuous parasites on wild nature.

We have, then, a basic difference in reaction tomass-use as between two categories of physical ob­jects pursued as trophies.

Let us now consider another component of recrea-

Conservation Esthetic 2.89

tion, which is more subtle and complex: the feelingof isolation in nature. That this is acquiring a scarcity­value that is very high to some persons is attested bythe wilderness controversy. Wilderness areas are byofficial definition roadless, with roads built only totheir edges. They are thus advertised as unique, asindeed they are. But before long trails are congested,there is pressure for access from the air; or an unex­pected fire necessitates splitting an area in two witha road to haul fire-fighters. Or the congestion in­duced by publicity may whip up the price of guidesand packers, whereupon somebody discovers that thewilderness policy is undemocratic. Or the local Cham­ber of Commerce, at first quiescent at the novelty ofa hinterland officially labeled as 'wild,' tastes.its firstblood of tourist money. It then wants ~ore, wilder­ness or no wilderness. The jeep and the airplane,creatures of the ever mounting pressure from human·ity, thus eliminate the opportunity for isolation innature.

In short, the very scarcity of wild places, reactingwith the mores of advertising and promotion, tendsto defeat any deliberate effort to prevent their grow­ing still more scarce.

It is clear without further discussion that mass-useinvolves a direct dilution of the opportunity for soli­tude; that when we speak of roads, campgrounds,trails, and toilets as 'development' of recreational re­sources, we speak falsely in respect to this component.Such accommodations for the crowd are not de­veloping (in the sense of adding or creating) any-

2.90 The Upshot

thing. On the contrary, they are merely water pouredinto the alreadycthin soup.

We now contrast with the isolationcComponent thatvery distinct if simple one which we may label'fresh-air and change of scene.' Mass-use neitherdestroys nor dilutes this value. The thousandth touristwho clicks the gate to the National Park breathesapproximately the same air, and experiences the samecontrast with Monday-at-the-office, as does the first.One might even believe that the gregarious assaulton the outdoors enhances the contrast.. We may say,then, that the fresh-air and change-of-scene com­ponent is like the photographic trophy-it withstandsmass-use without damage.

We come now to another component: the percep­tion of the natural processes by which the land andthe living things upon it have achieved their char­acteristic forms (evolution) and by which they main­tain their existence (ecology). That thing called'nature study,' despite the shiver it brings to thespines of. the elect, constitutes the first embryonicgroping of the mass-mind toward perception.

The outstanding characteristic of perception is thatit entails no consumption and no dilution of any re­source. The swoop. of a hawk, Jor example, is per­ceived by one as the drama of evolution. To anotherit is only a threat to the full frying-pan. The dramamay excite a hundred successive witnesses, the threatonly one-for he responds with a shotgun.

To promote perception is the only truly creativepart of recreational engineering.

t Conservation Esthetic 291

r This fact is important, and its potential power forI bettering 'the good life' only dimly understood. When~ Daniel Boone first entered into the forests and prairiesf of 'the dark and bloody ground,' he reduced to hist possession the pure essence of 'outdoor America.' Hei didn't call it that, but what he found is the thing we

now seek, and we here deal with things not names.Recreation, however, is not the outdoors, but our

reaction to it. Daniel Boone's reaction depended notonly on the quality of what he saw, but on the qual­ity of the mental eye with which he saw it. Ecologi­cal science has wrought a change in the mental eye.It has disclosed origins and functions for what toBoone were only facts. It has disclosed mechanismsfor what to Boone were only attributes. We have noyardstick to measure this change, but we may safelysay that, as compared with the competent ecologistof the present day, Boone saw only the surface ofthings. The incredible inti:icacies of the plant andanimal community-the intrinsic beauty of the organ­ism called America, then in the full bloom of hermaidenhood-were as invisible and incomprehensibleto Daniel Boone as they are today to Babbitt. Theonly true development in American recreational re­sources is the development of the perceptive facultyin Americans. All of the other acts we grace by thatname are, at best, attempts to retard or mask theprocess of dilution.

Let no man jump to the co~clusion that Babbittmust take his Ph.D. in ecology before he can 'see' hiscountry. On the contrary, the Ph.D. may become as

2.92 The Upshot

callous as an undertaker to the mysteries at which heofficiates. Like all real treasures of the mind, percep­tion can be split into in6.nitely small fractions with­out losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot conveythe same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may seein his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to thescientist adventuring in the South Seas. Perception,in short, cannot be purchased with either learneddegrees or dollars; it grows at home as well as abroad,and he who has a little may use it to as good ad~

vantage as he who .has much. As a search forpercep­tion, the recreational stampede is footless and unneces­sary.

There is, lastly, a 6.fth component: the sense ofhusbandry. It is unknown to the outdoorsman whoworks for conservation with his vote rather than with

Conservation Esthetic 293

his hands. It is realized only when some art of manage­mentis applied to land by some person of perception.That is to say, its enjoyment is reserved for land­holders too poor to buy their sport, and land ad­ministrators with a sharp eye and an ecological mind.The tourist who buys access to his scenery misses italtogether; so also the sportsman \Vho hires the state,or some underling, to be his gamekeeper. The Gov­ernment, which essays to substitute public for pri­vate operation of recreational lands, is unwittinglygiving away to its field officers a large share of whatit seeks to offer its citizens. We foresters and gamemanagers might logically pay for, instead of beingpaid for, our job as husbandmen of wild crops.

That a sense of husbandry exercised in the produc­tion of crops may be quite as important as the cropsthemselves is realized to some extent in agriculture,but not in conservation. American sportsmen hold insmall esteem the intensive game-cropping of theScottish moors- and the German forests, and in somerespects rightly. But they overlook entirely the senseof husbandry developed by the European land­holder in the process of cropping. We have no suchthing as yet. It is important. When we conclude thatwe must bait the farmer with subsidies to inducehim to raise a forest, or with gate receipts to inducehim to raise game, we are merely admitting that thepleasures of husbandry~in-the-wild are as yet un­known both to the farmer and to ourselves.

Scientists have an epigram: ontogeny repeats phy­logeny. What they mean is that the development of

294 The Upshot

each individual repeats the evolutionary history of therace. This is true of mental as well as physical things.The trophy-hunter is the caveman reborn. Trophy"hunting is the prerogative of youth, racial or indivi­dual, and nothing to apologize for.

The disquieting thing in the modem picture is thetrophy-hunter who never grows up, in whom thecapacity for isolation, perception, and husbandry isundeveloped, or perhaps lost. He is the motorizedant who swarms the continents before learning to seehis own back yard, who consumes but never createsoutdoor satisfactions. For him the recreational engi­neer dilutes the wilderness and artincializes its tro­phies in the fond· belief that he is rendering a publicservice.

The trophy-recreationist has peculiarities that con­tribute in subtle ways to his own undoing. To enjoyhe must possess, invade, appropriate. Hence the wil­derness that he cannot personally see has no value tohim. Hence the universal assumption that an unusedhinterland is rendering no service to society. To thosedevoid of imagination, a blank place on the map isa useless waste; to others, .the most valuable part.CIs my share in Alaska worthless to me because Ishall never go there? Do I need a road to show methe arctic prairies, the goose pastures of the Yukon,the Kodiak bear, the sheep meadows behind Mc­Kinley?)

It would appear, in short, that the rudimentarygrades of outdoor recreation consume their resource­

.base; the higher grades, at least to a degree, create

Conservation Esthetic

their own satisfactions with little or no attrition ofland or life. It is the expansion of transport withouta corresponding growth of perception that threatensus with qualitative bankruptcy of the recreationalprocess. Recreational development is a job not of build­ing roads into lovely country, but of building receptiv~

ity into the still unlovely human mind.

ALDO LEOPOLD was born in Burlington, Iowa, in1887. Educated at the Lawrenceville School and YaleUniversity, he joined the United States Forest Serv­ice in 1909 as a Forest Assistant in New Mexico andArizona. One of the founders of the WildernessSociety, he initiated, in 1924, the first Forest Wilder­ness Area in the United States which is now the GilaNational Forest. Moving to Madison, Wisconsin, hewas Associate Director of the Forest Products Labo­ratory, as well as consulting forester to several states.Mr. Leopold founded the profession of game man­agement and wrote the first important book on thissubject. In 1933, the University of Wisconsin createda chair of game management for him. He died in1948, while fighting a brush fire on a neighbor's farm.His death cut short an assignment as an adviser onconservation to the United Nations, and left thisbook as the last statement of his uncompromisingphilosophy.