A fine new book consolidating all of the writings of Aldo Leopold has just been published--------A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation By Aldo Leopold Library of America, 931 pages, $35.....................As Wall Street Journalist, Robert Macfarlane reviewed so well recently,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, Leopold was truly a "Prophet" as it pertained to our natural systems and the animals(including man) that inhabited them......... He advocated instead a new attitude—an intelligent humility towards man's place in nature........... His propositions were radical............: He wanted "wild country" and "threatened species of wildlife" to be regarded as "political minorities" and treated with the same kinds of legislative "respect" as would be extended to human minorities........... He advanced the notion of "biotic right," whereby species should be permitted to exist "regardless of the presence or absence of economic advantage to us"............ And he wanted a total reboot of the conservation movement, moving it away from any "Abrahamic" espousal of use-value and cost-benefit analysis...........In Leopold's own words----"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"---------So powerful and singularly focused are those words,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,Every Congressman, Senator, Game Commissioner and Wildlife Worker at the Federal, State and Local level should be made to read Leopold from cover to cover-----and then we vote on how to manage wild places and wildlife!!!!!!!

The Prophet in the Wilderness

A hunter as well as a pioneering conservationist, Aldo Leopold understood the land better than any other writer.

wallstreetjournal.comBy Robert Macfarlane

For a conservationist, Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) was a surprisingly keen killer of creatures. This new edition of his writings is glutted with slaughter. Memories of early kills are summoned back as ecstasy ("I remember only my unspeakable delight when my first duck hit the snowy ice with a thud and lay there, belly up, red legs kicking") or as comedy: "It was such a funny performance to kill a rabbit with a rubbergun that we all roared with laughter." One evening in the Colorado River delta, a flock of avocets passed over the campsite of Leopold and his brother: "Carl got three. They are the most delicately beautiful of all water birds." On the same trip, the brothers trapped beavers, shot coots and peregrine falcons, and caught a cormorant, which they then tethered as live bait near a bobcat den. In midlife, Leopold became a devoted bowhunter, stalking wild turkey, deer and antelope and rejoicing at the "unmistakable thud of the arrow striking flesh."

A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation

By Aldo Leopold 
Library of America, 931 pages, $35

Enlarge Image

David Muench//Cobis

untouched New Mexico's Gila Widerness, which Aldo Leopold helped preserve.

It seems a pure paradox: How could this slayer, gutter and gorer of wild creatures also be the thinker who gave us "the land ethic," by which "conservation becomes possible only when man assumes the role of citizen in a community of which soils and waters, plants and animals are fellow members, each dependent on the others, and each entitled to his place in the sun"? We expect our conservationists to be more like the Jain-ish John Muir, who refused to swat mosquitoes even as they fed on him.

In fact, it was Leopold's death-dealings that gave his prose its song and his philosophy its edge. His most famous essay, "Thinking Like a Mountain," was written in 1944 but recalled an incident from September 1909, when he was in Arizona on a surveying assignment for the U.S. Forestry Service. Leopold and his companions were eating lunch when they saw an old she-wolf and her six grown pups crossing a river. The men grabbed their rifles and in "a second . . . were pumping lead into the pack." The mother wolf was mortally wounded, and Leopold reached her "in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes." "I realized then," he wrote, "and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain.

How do mountains think? Patiently, connectedly, in terms of species rather than individuals and with wisdom about the limits of short-term fixes (killing all wolves in order to protect cattle) and the laws of unintended consequences (the resulting boom in deer population left the mountain browsed "first to . . . desuetude and then to death").

Leopold gradually learned to think like a mountain. More than any other American environmental writer save perhaps Wendell Berry, he understood the systems of the land. An Iowa childhood spent hunting, fishing and reading the work of Muir, Thoreau and Emerson had left him committed to a life involving wilderness. In 1906 he was admitted to the Yale Forestry School, under the tuition of the utilitarian father of modern conservation, Gifford Pinchot. Leopold worked for the U.S. Forestry Service until 1928 as a surveyor, mapper and policy maker and argued fiercely within the organization for preserving tracts of roadless wild.

In 1933, he was appointed to a professorship in game management at the University of Wisconsin, where he taught a course called Wildlife Ecology 118, in which students learned "to read the landscape." In 1934, he co-founded the Wilderness Society; the following year he bought a run-down river farm with 80 acres in Wisconsin and began the long process of renovating the property and afforesting the land with pines. Leopold's energy was immense—countless initiatives, committees, surveys, trips, political maneuverings, publications—and he even died energetically, felled by a heart attack in 1948 while fighting a grass fire on his neighbor's property.

The week before his death, Leopold received confirmation that Oxford University Press would publish his collection "A Sand County Almanac," an account of his attempt to live "by and with, rather than on, the American land." The book is now a classic, but its path to print was not easy. Knopf and Macmillan both declined the manuscript, with the Knopf editor recommending that Leopold make it a book "purely of nature observations, with less emphasis on . . . ecological ideas."

This was skewy advice, for Leopold is most valuable not as a stylist but as a theorist. He lacks, at the level of the sentence, the rasp of Edward Abbey, the lyric touch of Barry Lopez and the zig-zag-zaniness of Annie Dillard. There are, it is true, moments of soft beauty: mist advancing across a landscape "like the white ghost of a glacier," geese cries like "a wild poem dropped from the murky skies upon the muds of March." And he was an experimental writer, capable of strange forms: "A Sand County Almanac" contains some unusual pieces, including "Blue River," a tiny prose-poem formed of color-dashes ("brilliant green flies," "the little red bird," "the green depths of the cottonwood"), and "Odyssey," which imagines the biography of an "itinerant atom" identified only as "X."

But his prose is sharpest in the service of argument rather than description. His epigrams are whipcrack-smart. On progress and the environment: "We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam-shovel, and we are proud of our yardage." On childhood: "the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is . . . actually a process of growing down; experience . . . is actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living."

To Leopold, a basic fallacy ran through modern thought: "the assumption . . . that the human relation to land is only economic." He advocated instead "a new attitude—an intelligent humility towards man's place in nature." His propositions were radical: He wanted "wild country" and "threatened species of wildlife" to be regarded as "political minorities" and treated with the same kinds of legislative "respect" as would be extended to human minorities. He advanced the notion of "biotic right," whereby species should be permitted to exist "regardless of the presence or absence of economic advantage to us." And he wanted a total reboot of the conservation movement, moving it away from any "Abrahamic" espousal of use-value and cost-benefit analysis:

Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. 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.

Leopold's influence took time to diffuse. It was not until the 1960s that he was read beyond conservation circles and his foresight appreciated. Roderick Nash's classic study, "Wilderness and the American Mind" (1967), included a chapter titled "Aldo Leopold: Prophet." Today, he is still widely studied and cited, as well as read for pleasure rather than policy.

Reading across these 800-odd pages of Leopold's writings—hunting journals (with accompanying sketch-maps and photographs); letters; essays; lectures and fragments of memoir, all superbly selected and annotated by Curt Meine—you watch the flex and growth of his ideas, from his early attachment to wilderness as a place of frontiersman test to his communitarian vision of the land ethic. You see, too, how relevant his writing remains, 65 years after his death. You feel the truth of his belief that we must somehow think our way out of environmental crisis: "No important change in human conduct is ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphases, our loyalties, our affections and our convictions." And—looking around at our unraveling world—you hopelessly acknowledge the impossibility of such "internal change." Still, Leopold had a one-liner for that, too: Humans are like the "potato-bug, which exterminated the potato, and thereby exterminated itself."

—Mr. Macfarlane is the author of, 
most recently, "The Old Ways:
A Journey on Foot."