A Leopold Biography: Interview With Marybeth Lorbiecki (Part II)
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.
Lets talk with Ms. Lorbiecki in part two of this three part interview:
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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.
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 overbrowsing 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 aeons, 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."
This could be interpreted as a re-envisioning of Pinchot's directive that could stand Hadley's test of time. "The greatest good" and "the greatest number," are no longer defined in purely human terms, because Leopold felt that in the long run, this was self-destructing.
He wrote:
"In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such."
"In human history, we have learned (I hope) that the conqueror role is eventually self-defeating. Why? Because it is implicit in such a role that the conqueror knows ex cathedra, just what makes the community clock tick, and just what and who is valuable, and what and who is worthless, in community life. It always turns out that he knows neither, and this is why his conquests eventually defeat themselves."
This is the particular place where Pinchot and Leopold differ. Pinchot, high on the knowledge of the emerging science of forestry, believed that foresters had the information they needed to understand how a forest works. And based on this knowledge and his guiding principle, they could make sustainable land use decisions. However, once Leopold acknowledged that he could not, nor could any human at this point, know the land community well enough to take a beneficial dictatorial position to it, he had to back away from Pinchot's approach -- as Pinchot might have done himself had he lived long enough and see the kinds of things Leopold had seen.
Leopold comes in the end to the conclusion that ethics will have to guide us, more than economic considerations or short-sighted self-interest:
"When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."
Perhaps Hadley's test of time has shown how truly Leopold was a disciple of the spirit of Pinchot. In the 1990s, American foresters have integrated Leopold's Land Ethic into their professional code, and a group called the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics formed to work for greater attention to Leopold's ethic within day-to-day decisions in the Forest Service.
Q: Aldo has had a profound impact on the development of American ecological conscience. Was it really Leopold or was it human progress through Thoreau, Muir, Darwin, Evans, and Schweitzer that influenced Leopold....
Marybeth Lorbiecki: Well, it was both. How does any progress of thought occur but through an individual's interpretation and expansion of a communty's philosophical heritage according to his or her personal experience.
Leopold was extremely well read, far beyond just the parameters of American philosophical history, and he gained much from all those people you mentioned, but from so many more: Teddy Roosevelt, William Temple Hornaday, Ouspensky, the Bible, Charles Elton, L. H. Bailey, Victor Hugo, Cicero, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson, Lao-Tzu, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Herodotus, Izaak Walton, and the list goes on and on. And that is not even really hitting upon the everyday people and scientists he met who had ethical stances that he appreciated, including members of his own family.
So, though he was a product of his time and place, he wasn't an inevitable entity. And he wasn't the only person then or since who has felt and philosophized as he has about conservation. But he is remembered for the power of his specific articulation of these feelings and philosophies (based on his personal, scientific, and social observations), despite their possible flaws or incompleteness.
In a way, Leopold's life story exemplifies the line of ethical progression that Americans seem to be on. As I see it, though, we are still in Leopold's early years, and it does not seem the least bit inevitable to me that we shall make it as a people to the wisdom of his later years (though I hope and believe that we shall!) I think any attempt to get the public to start talking about the concept of a land ethic will help us on our journey.
You make an A+ on your answers. Another great job, Marybeth; some great insight here and we still have one more to do!
You can pick up a copy of Aldo Leopold: A Fierce Green Fire in my book recommendations...
