Q: That leads directly to my next question. Leopold's experience as a young forester in New Mexico includes killing a mother wolf and her pups in 1909. This experience helped change Leopold from a youth with "trigger itch" to a scientist and philosopher deeply concerned with "upsetting the balance of nature". Your book's title reflects this wilderness transformation. Explain....
Marybeth Lorbiecki : It was a long journey from that scene on the mountain when Leopold self-righteously shot the wolves in as part of an ongoing effort to extirpate this decried predator from the national forests. Leopold was merely acting according to the common wisdom of the time. There were clearly "beneficial species" and then there were "varmints." Plain and simple.
Or so Leopold thought. It was only after he watched the deterioration of deer populations from starvation and the over-browsing of forests by the overpopulated herds that Leopold began to regret his earlier participation in the "ecological murder' of predators in the Southwest. In his masterful essay, "Thinking Like a Mountain", written near the end of his life, Leopold recalls that incident and admits:
"We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes -- something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch, I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with me."
Based on this and other such experiences, Leopold wrote in a separate essay, "The Round River":
"Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. By land is meant all of the things on, over, or in the earth. Harmony with the land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you can not love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism."
Leopold completed this thought with some of his most oft-quoted lines:
"If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of eons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering."
Obviously, he had come a long way.
Let me add a contemporary footnote to the wolf story. This spring, the US Fish and Wildlife released three Mexican wolves to the Blue Range (where Leopold shot his wolves) in an attempt to reintroduce the species. So time can help forgive some of our sins.
Q: Explain Aldo Leopold's change from being a "disciple" of Pinchot to transforming Gifford Pinchot's "greatest good to the greatest numbers" dictum to a more radical, ecological approach...
Marybeth Lorbiecki : Man, these are huge questions!
One of Leopold's favorite quotations was from Yale's President Hadley, who defined truth as 'that which prevails in the long run.' I believe Leopold actually tested Pinchot's approach by Hadley's, and found it lacking. Thus he came to believe that Pinchot's definition of what was "right" for the forests -- that which provided the "greatest good for the greatest number in the long run" -- was a self-deconstructing precept (and therefore untrue) when understood merely in terms of forest production.
Leopold appreciated Pinchot's foresight in delineating an overriding governing principle, a criteria by which all foresters could judge their work and a value upon which they could base their debates about land use. But in examining this "ethic" from the time-table provided by Hadley, Leopold found himself needing to broaden the "greatest good" to encompass the land community's overall health.
He came to this conclusion through scientific observations of the land's slow degradation in terms of sustainable soils, vegetation, wildlife, and water quality under the direction of Pinchot's narrower vision.
So as Leopold found Pinchot's precept stretched to its limit and ultimately found lacking, he strove to articulate a new guiding principle. I would suggest that Leopold's progress from Pinchot to Pinchot plus Hadley, measured by scientific research, exemplifies the progression of Leopold's intellectual life in this area, and it shows how his Land Ethic fits in: "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."
