Marybeth Lorbiecki lives, writes, and gardens in Hudson, Wisconsin. She is the author of Aldo Leopold: A Fierce Green Fire and John Burrough's award winning biography for children, Of 'Things Natural, Wild, and Free: A Story about Aldo Leopold . Her other environmental titles include Earthwise at Home , Earthwise at Play , and Earthwise at School .
L ets talk with Ms. Lorbiecki in part two of this three part interview:
Q: Marybeth, you had easy questions the first interview <grin>. Lets dig a little deeper here. Nina Leopold Bradley (ed note: Aldo Leopold's daughter) suggests that hunting was to Aldo an "expression of love for the natural world". She goes on to say that hunting prepared her father for what was to come. Please explain.
Marybeth Lorbiecki : I'm glad you asked this question and I think it is a fairly complex one. Leopold was a keen hunter and fisherman all his life, and these outdoors activities were a source of pleasure as well as conflicts, dilemmas, and intellectual challenges.
Though hunting was, as Nina says, an expression of Leopold's love of nature, Leopold was never limited to it. He enjoyed just "tramping" through the woods and fields, as well as observing, writing, sketching, and later taking photographs of nature's subjects. Many of these naturalistic and artistic responses were the direct gifts of his Grandfather Charles Starker and his mother.
In contrast, under his father's hunting tutelage, Leopold came to know in a more intense and intimate way the daily life-and-death struggles within the natural world. He had to try to learn to think like the animals he stalked: what they needed to survive, how they interacted, what their habits were.
Beyond even his love for nature, Leopold appreciated hunting because he saw it as a modern means to honing one's self-reliance, hardihood, woodcraft, and marksmanship -- pitting oneself against the elements, so to speak. It is was a kind of adventure, though, that was under threat from the "urge for comfort at all costs," the tendencies toward mechanized gadgetry.
Leopold complained that the sporting-goods dealer "has draped the American outdoorsman with an infinity of contraptions, all offered as aids to self-reliance, hardihood, woodcraft, or marksmanship, but too often functioning as substitutes for them." And this seemed like a death knell to real sportsmanship as Leopold perceived it. He, like his father before him, often felt disenfranchised by the lack of hunting ethics or sportsmanship he sometimes witnessed from fellow hunters. When trying to whip up enthusiasm for conservation among hunters in New Mexico, he wrote: "It is an honor to win, by enterprise and skill, the reputation of being a keen and successful sportsman. But to acquire a reputation for killing limits is a doubtful compliment, at best."
In truth, Leopold was never totally comfortable the emphasis on killing in hunting. The naturalist part of him often liked to take a break from being a key player in the survival of the fittest. In high school, he wrote home to his father: "I hope you ... will enjoy many of these fine Spring days over in the swamps, just SEEING things; indeed, I cannot wanting to kill anything now when there is so much to see and appreciate out of doors."
As he matured, he turned more and more to less mechanical forms of hunting -- such as in fishing with home-tied flies and bow hunting with personally made tackle -- where there was an emphasis on the skill and craftsmanship of the entire process rather than on the take-home kill.
Now, that is not to say that Leopold was not a committed hunter until the day he died. He was. It was the first and primary motivator to work in game protection and management, and it was through hunting that he came to fully understand wildlife's needs for sufficient habitat. It was also through hunting that he saw his biggest mistake played out -- the unfortunate results of his youthful hubris regarding game and predators.
