Review: Aldo Leopold - A Fierce Green Fire

I took great pleasure in interviewing Aldo Leopold biographer Marybeth Lorbiecki on About Forestry. Leopold has been a man of inspiration for me throughout my forestry career. A real treat came to me when Marybeth Lorbiecki asked me to review her book. I said "heck yes!" and thoroughly enjoyed the read and her insight into Mr. Leopold's life.

Aldo Leopold, known as the father of wildlife management, was a graduate of Yale School of Forestry and an early employee of the U.S. Forest Service. His career developed during the formative years of American forestry; he was surrounded and interacted with conservation legends like Gifford Pinchot and Ding Darling. Leopold had a love for the outdoors, a love for hunting and a flair for prose. His most famous book, A Sand County Almanac has been read by generations of environmentalists and lovers of the out-of-doors.

The real advantage in reading A Fierce Green Fire is that Lorbiecki has surrounded herself with people who are intimately knowledgeable about Aldo Leopold to include Curt Meine and Leopold's daughter Nina. Meine is a noted Pulitzer Prize nominated biographer of Leopold and Nina has personal family insight and a trove of photographs that Lorbiecki uses freely in the book. Lorbiecki exploits this for our benefit.

Lorbiecki produces a very readable biography of Aldo Leopold. The beauty of A Fierce Green Fire is its simplicity in the face of other "massive" works that cover the subject well, but at the expense of being an enjoyable read. As I have mentioned, it is amply supplied with rare photos.

When asked why she wrote about Aldo Leopold, Lorbiecki replied that Leopold's "writings and his life has inspired and enriched me, but it is the lands he helped to preserve that nourish me. Because of this, I continually return to him, so that I, too, might learn how to live on the land and pass it on in healthier shape than I encountered." A Fierce Green Fire is enjoyable from cover to cover.