Abstract
For Leopold, by the late 1930s it had become a regular drumbeat: Conservation was not chiefly about restoring and protecting land. It was about improving people and transforming culture, rebuilding values from the ground up. It was about making “a new kind of people,” as he said in his letter to former student Douglas Wade; it was about “rebuilding Homo sapiens” and producing a “new kind of farmer, banker, voter, consumer, etc.,” as he phrased it for Morris Cooke. How could we change the ways we use land, Leopold asked, without “an internal change in our intellectual emphases, our loyalties, our affections, and our convictions”? How could we “improve the face of the land without improving ourselves”?
We learned that you can’t conserve game by itself; to rebuild the game resource you must first rebuild the game range [i. e., the land], and this means rebuilding the people who use it, and all of the things they use it for.
Aldo Leopold, “A Survey of Conservation”
Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you.
Aldo Leopold, “Wherefore Wildlife Ecology?”
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Notes
- 1.
AL, letter to Douglas Wade, 23October 1944, LP 10-8, 1.
- 2.
AL, letter to Morris L. Cooke (Friends of the Land), 30 September 1940, LP 10-2, 4. See also “The State of the Profession,” RMG, p. 280.
- 3.
AL, “The Ecological Conscience,” RMG, p. 338.
- 4.
Ibid., p. 340.
- 5.
AL, “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest,” RMG, pp. 94–97.
- 6.
AL, “A Criticism of the Booster Spirit,” RMG, pp. 102, 103.
- 7.
See AL, “The Arboretum and the University,” Parks and Recreation 18, no. 2 (October 1934): 59–60; also in RMG, pp. 209–211. See C. Meine, “Reimagining the Prairie: Aldo Leopold and the Origins of Prairie Restoration,” in Recovering the Prairie, edited by R. F. Sayre (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), pp. 144–160. The story of the founding of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum is told in N. Sachse. A Thousand Ages: The University of Wisconsin Arboretum(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965). See also J. B. Callicott, “The Arboretum and the University: The Speech and the Essay,” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 87 (1999): 5–22.
- 8.
AL, letter to P. E. McNall, 27 February 1936, LP 10-5, 2.
- 9.
N. A., “Plan for Utilization of Milford Meadows Disconnected 5 Acre Tract,” p. 2, LP 10-5, 2 (2).
- 10.
Ibid., p. 1.
- 11.
AL, letter to P. E. McNall, 27 February 1936. It remains uncertain what happened to the plan to dedicate the five-acre Milford Meadows tract (Betty Hawkins, personal communication, 2006). But in May 1940, the nearby Faville Grove Prairie was turned into a pasture. See AL, “Exit Orchis,” 15 May 1940, LP 10-5, 2, and in Wisconsin Wildlife 2, no. 2 (August 1940): 17.
- 12.
Ibid.; McNall, “Plan for Utilization”; see, too, one-page collage of news clippings and photos of “wildlifers club” (27 March 1936), “the nature class,” (early spring 1936), and other related events, LP 10-5, 2.
- 13.
AL, “The Conservation Ethic,” RMG, p. 190; A L et al., “The University and Conservation of Wisconsin Wildlife: Science Inquiry Publication III,” Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin series no. 2211, general series no. 1995 (February 1937): 35.
- 14.
AL, letter to W. K. Thomas, 24 April 1939, LP 10-2, 7.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
AL, “The Role of Wildlife in Education,” unfinished, n.d., p. 1, LP 10-6, 16.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
AL, “Suggestions for American Wildlife Conference,” unpublished, 27 October 1935, p. 2, LP 10-6, 16.
- 20.
Ibid., p. 1.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
AL, “The Arboretum and the University,” RMG, p. 210. See AL, “Role of Wildlife in Education,” p. 3, and AL, Game Management (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933), p. 423.
- 24.
24. AL, SCA, p. ix.
- 25.
AL, Game Management, pp. 420, 423.
- 26.
AL, “Role of Wildlife in Education,” pp. 1, 3.
- 27.
AL, “The Role of Wildlife in a Liberal Education,” Transactions of the 7th North American Wildlife Conference (8–10 April 1942): 485–489; also in RMG, pp. 301, 302.
- 28.
AL, “The Role of Wildlife in a Liberal Education,” RMG, p. 303. See also Chapter 7, p. 221.
- 29.
AL et al., “The University and Conservation of Wisconsin Wildlife: Science Inquiry Publication III,” Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin series no. 2211, general series no. 1995 (February 1937), p. 26.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
AL, “Wherefore Wildlife Ecology?” RMG, p. 336. See also J. B. Callicott, “Aldo Leopold on Education, as Educator, and His Land Ethic in the Context of Environmental Education,” Journal of Environmental Education 14 (1982): 34–41, and W. Kessler and A. Booth, “Professor Leopold, What Is Education For?”Wildlife Society Bulletin (Winter 1998): 707–712.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
Ibid., pp. 336–337.
- 38.
Anonymous, “Preliminary Organization of a Society of Wildlife Specialists” (taking place at the North American Wildlife Conference, Washington, DC, February 1936);Anonymous, “The Wildlife Society: A General Statement,” 1937, p. 1, LP 10-2, 9.
- 39.
As the organization developed, members of the Ecological Society of America raised the question of formal affiliation of the new Wildlife Specialists with the ESA. Walter Taylor (on the executive committee of the ESA) wrote to Leopold on 25 May 1936, asking: “Do you think it necessary to form a new society and thereby promote the continued disintegration of biologists and their organizations? Would it not be possible for us to form a section on wildlife of some such organization as the Ecological Society of America? You have most eloquently and effectively urged the integration of conservation as related to activities. Why should we not, like the chemist, work toward the better co-ordination and integration of biological organizations?” Leopold came to favor the idea, but the merger never took place. See P. Errington, letter to W. L. McAtee, 23November 1936, LP 10-2, 9. See also J. L. Newton, “Science, Recreation, and Leopold’s Quest for a Durable Scale,” in Wilderness Debate, vol. 2, edited by M. Nelson and J. B. Callicott (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006). In a 1939 letter from E. V. Komarek to Gardiner Bump of the NYS Conservation Department is found evidence regarding the impression the ESA had given: it had been accused publicly at a meeting in St. Louis of “intellectual snobbery.” LP 10-2, 2.
- 40.
Anonymous, “Wildlife Society: A General Statement,” p. 1; “The Constitution and By-laws of The Wildlife Society,” 1937, LP 10-2, 9.
- 41.
Anonymous, “Constitution and By-laws,” p. 1.
- 42.
Anonymous, “Wildlife Society: A General Statement,” p. 2.
- 43.
Rudolf Bennitt, letter to AL, 1November 1937, LP 10-2, 9.
- 44.
AL, letter to Rudolf Bennitt, 4November 1937, LP 10-2, 9.
- 45.
Victor Calahane, letter to AL, 16 April 1938, LP 10-2, 9.
- 46.
See Journal of Wildlife Management 3, no. 2 (April 1939).
- 47.
Douglas Wade sent a thoughtful response (ca. 1938, LP 10-2, 9) to Leopold’s earliest draft (May 1938, titled “What a Wildlife Manager Should Be and Know”) with thoughtful comments. Leopold incorporated Wade’s comments in following drafts, including changing the title, which Wade thought was redundant. LP 10-2, 9.
- 48.
AL, letter to Rudolf Bennitt, 24 September 1938, LP 10-2, 9.
- 49.
Charles Elton, letter to AL, 28 September 1938, LP 10-2, 9.
- 50.
AL, “Professional Training in Wildlife Management,” 6 September 1938 draft, p. 2, LP 10-2, 9.
- 51.
Charles Elton, letter to AL, 28 September 1938, LP 10-2, 9.
- 52.
AL, letter to Rudolf Bennitt, 24 September 1938, LP 10-2, 9.
- 53.
AL, letter to Rudolf Bennitt, 8 September 1938, LP 10-2, 9.
- 54.
AL et al., “Professional Training in Wildlife Work,” 30November 1938, pp. 1–9, LP 10-2, 9. Incidentally, Leopold graduated from his program at the University of Wisconsin one of the first women in the field—Frances Hamerstrom.
- 55.
Ibid., pp. 1–3.
- 56.
Ibid., pp. 3, 5.
- 57.
Ibid., p. 4.
- 58.
Ibid., p. 5.
- 59.
Ibid.
- 60.
Ibid.
- 61.
Ibid., p. 4.
- 62.
Ibid., p. 6.
- 63.
Ibid., p. 4.
- 64.
Ibid., p. 7.
- 65.
Ibid., p. 8.
- 66.
Ibid.
- 67.
Ibid.
- 68.
Ibid. To test the plausibility of the standards in 1939, Leopold conducted a mental experiment using his own graduate students: “I have tested the standards as now revised on my own mental picture of four of my best students—Hawkins, Frederick and Frances Hamerstrom, and Hochbaum. Unless my picture is altogether distorted, they could score on all of the points listed. On the other hand, I admit that no such average could reasonably be expected in any considerable number of students.” See AL, letter to Rudolf Bennitt, 16 January 1939, LP 10-2, 9.
- 69.
See AL, Game Management, pp. 211, 403: “In the long run, no system is satisfactory which does not conserve the rich variety of our game fauna, as distinguished from merely its most resistant and ‘shootable’ species.… The objective of a conservation program for non-game wild life should be exactly parallel [to game management]: to retain for the average citizen the opportunity to see, admire and enjoy, and the challenge to understand, the varied forms of birds and mammals indigenous to his state. It implies not only that these forms be kept in existence, but that the greatest possible variety of them exist in each community.” Paul Errington noted in his dissertation (“The Northern Bobwhite: Environmental Factors Influencing Its Status,” University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2May 1932, p. a) that “[t]he term ‘wild life’ now has an accepted meaning, embracing fishes, birds, mammals, and the related association of fields, forests, and waters. Report of Special Committee on Conservation of Wild Life Resources to U.S. Senate, Jan. 21, 1931.” And in AL et al., “Professional Training in Wildlife Work,” 30 November 1938, p. 2, it is noted that “[w]ildlife.… includes both animals and plants, both terrestrial and aquatic. Where the illustrative material implies a narrower scope, the reader is asked to interpolate to the broader one.”
In 1936 Leopold urged his colleagues to attend particularly to threatened forms of wildlife, calling them the “crux of conservation policy.” “The new organizations which have now assumed the name ‘wildlife’ instead of ‘game,’” he argued, “are I think obligated to focus a substantial part of their effort on these threatened forms.” AL, “Threatened Species,” RMG, pp. 231–232. See also C. D. Meine, Correction Lines: Essays on Land, Leopold, and Conservation (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004), p. 127. Leopold also served on the Committee on Bird Protection of the American Ornithologists’ Union in the early 1940s, and beginning in themid-1930s he urged the creation of conservation inventories of threatened species. See also AL, “Proposal for a Conservation Inventory of Threatened Species,” unpublished, unfinished, UWDWE; AL, letters to Jay Darling, 21 and 23 November 1939, LP 10-4, 8.
- 70.
Game management, Leopold wrote, “proposes a motivation—the love of sport—narrow enough actually to get action from human beings as now constituted, but nevertheless capable of expanding with time into that new social concept toward which conservation is groping.” AL, Game Management, p. 423.
- 71.
AL, “Notes on the Weights and Plumages of Ducks in New Mexico,” Condor 21, no. 3 (May–June 1919): 128–129; AL, “Relative Abundance of Ducks in the Rio Grande Valley,” Condor 21, no. 3 (May–June 1919): 122; AL, “A Hunter’s Notes on Ducks in the Rio Grande Valley,” Condor 23, no. 1 (January–February 1921): 19–21;AL, “Weights and Plumages of Ducks in the Rio Grande Valley,” Condor 23, no. 3 (May–June 1921): 85–86.
- 72.
AL, “The Sportsman-Naturalist: Some Commonly Overlooked Opportunities for Real Contributions to Natural History and Game Management,” unfinished, n.d., UWDWE, vol. 2, p. 329, and LP 10-6, 17, p. 169. The statement was intended to introduce an article that Leopold apparently never finished.
- 73.
AL, “What Is a Sportsman?” unfinished, n.d., UWDWE, vol. 1, and LP 10-6, 17, p. 166.
- 74.
Ibid.
- 75.
Ibid.
- 76.
Ibid.
- 77.
AL, “Wildlife in American Culture,” Journal of Wildlife Management 7, no. 1 (January 1943): 1–6; also in SCA, p. 177.
- 78.
AL, “Wildlife in American Culture,” SCA, p. 177.
- 79.
Ibid., p. 179.
- 80.
Ibid., p. 177.
- 81.
Ibid., p. 179;On the other hand, voluntary disregard of hunting ethics could work to degenerate and deprave him.
- 82.
Ibid., p. 178.
- 83.
Ibid., p. 179.
- 84.
T. B. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Modern Library, 1934). Leopold used in class the 1931 edition (New York: Viking Press). With Charles Beard, James Harvey Robinson, and John Dewey, Veblen, after teaching at the University of Chicago and Stanford University, helped found in 1919 the New School for Social Research in New York City.
- 85.
Ibid., p. 275.
- 86.
Ibid., p. 247.
- 87.
Ibid., pp. 253–256.
- 88.
AL, “List of References/Questions for Discussion” for Game Management 118 (1937), p. 2, UWDWE. AL assigned his class chap. 10 (“Modern Survivals of Prowess”) of Veblen’s book.
- 89.
AL, “The Farmer as a Conservationist,” FHL, p. 167.
- 90.
AL, “Game Methods: The American Way,” American Game 20, no. 2 (March–April 1931): 20, 29–31; also in RMG, p. 163.
- 91.
AL, “Hobbies,” address to the Parent-Teacher Association, Randall School, Madison, Wisconsin, 10 April 1935, p. 1, UWDWE, vol. 1.
- 92.
Ibid.
- 93.
Ibid.
- 94.
Ibid., p. 2. See, too, AL, “A Man’s Leisure Time,” address to the University of New Mexico Assembly, 15October 1920, LP 10-6, 16 (4), and in RR, p. 8: “A good hobby may be a solitary revolt against the commonplace, or it may be the joint conspiracy of a congenial group. That group may, on occasion, be the family. In either event it is a rebellion, and if a hopeless one, all the better. I cannot imagine a worse jumble than to have the whole body politic suddenly ‘adopt’ all the foolish ideas that smolder in happy discontent beneath the conventional surface of society. There is no such danger. Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals, and will grow no faster than other new functions. Science is just beginning to discover what incredible regimentation prevails among the ‘free’ savages, and the freer mammals and birds. A hobby is perhaps creation’s first denial of the ‘peck-order’ that burdens the gregarious universe, and of which the majority of mankind is still a part.”
- 95.
Leopold was proud when his wife, Estella, was women’s archery champion in the state of Wisconsin for five years running and placed 4th at the nationals in 1930. See C. D. Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 269.
- 96.
AL, “Hobbies,” p. 2.
- 97.
AL, “Wildlife in American Culture,” SCA, p. 180.
- 98.
AL, “Smoky Gold,” SCA, p. 56.
- 99.
AL, “Wildlife in American Culture,” SCA, p. 183.
- 100.
AL, “Red Lanterns,” SCA, pp. 62–65.
- 101.
AL, “Red Legs Kicking,” SCA, pp. 120–122.
- 102.
Ibid., p. 121.
- 103.
Ibid.
- 104.
AL, “Conservation Esthetic,” SCA, p. 176.
- 105.
See Olaus J. Murie, letter to AL, 30 October 1931, LP 10-3, 10. Murie had just read Leopold’s “Game Methods: The American Way” (RMG, pp. 156–163) and was intrigued by Leopold’s second theorem, which conditioned American game matters: the recreational value of game is inversely related to the artificiality of its origin. “I think you have struck a very fine note,” wrote Murie. “I have felt that in recent times hunting has lost much of its old time flavor, some of the esthetic ‘aura’ is vanishing from our sport. I do not mean to say that the fine type of sportsman is gone, for I meet one every once in a while. But in the grand scramble for one’s own share of game in many places the result is mere killing and our so called recreational values are not felt.”
- 106.
AL, “Conservation Esthetic,” SCA, p. 170.
- 107.
In 1937 Leopold exchanged remarks with T. D. Peffley, a car dealer in Dayton, Ohio, who was a member of the local chapter of the Izaak Walton League of America: “I am intensely interested in your situation, because the scientific idea of predation, if it can be ‘sold’ to sportsmen at all, should be salable to the I.W.L.A. I say this as a sportsman and a long-time member. The information you ask for is voluminous.… I will, however, attempt to give you a comprehensive summary of why we game managers think that ‘vermin campaigns’ are ordinarily not only useless, but actually harmful to conservation.” AL, letter to T. D. Peffley, 11 May 1937, in response to T. D. Peffley, letter to AL, 5May 1937, LP 10-2, 5. Leopold followed with nine points of scientific argument regarding the matter, concluding: “All of the foregoing propositions are supportable by physical evidence. It should be admitted, though, that the game manager’s view is in part determined by personal conviction on certain questions of abstract principle, not easily proven either pro or con.
“One of these is that the opportunity to see predators has just as high sport value as the opportunity to see game, and if we can have a reasonable amount of game without blanket vermin control, then those who practice it are, wittingly or unwittingly, disregarding the rights and interests of others.… No game manager has ever said that all predator-control is useless or wrong. Most game managers agree, however, that ‘campaigns’ (i.e., the artificial whipping up of control activities by bounties, prizes or competition) are inherently devoid of discrimination in what, where, when, or how much to control.”
- 108.
AL, “Conservation Esthetic,” SCA, p. 173.
- 109.
Ibid.
- 110.
Ibid.
- 111.
Ibid., pp. 176–177.
- 112.
AL, “Obituary: P. S. Lovejoy,” Journal of Wildlife Management 7, no. 1 (1943): 126. The full passage from the text, quoting Lovejoy: “Our [ecological engineer] will bear in mind that Homo sapiens is still considerably sap. The normal function of the politician is to take the public where he thinks it wants to go; the function of our engineer is to take the public where it will be glad to be when it gets there.”
- 113.
AL, “Wildlife in American Culture,” SCA, p. 178.
- 114.
Ibid., p. 184.
- 115.
Ibid. See, too, AL, “Dear Judge Botts,” unpublished, n.d., LP 10-6, 16; AL, “A Man’s Leisure Time,” RR, p. 5.
- 116.
AL, “Wildlife in American Culture,” SCA, p. 185.
- 117.
AL, “Wildlife in American Culture,” Journal of Wildlife Management 7, no. 1 (January 1943): 5.
- 118.
AL, “The State of the Profession,” Journal of Wildlife Management 4, no. 3 (July 1940): 343–346; also in RMG, p. 280.
- 119.
AL, “The State of the Profession,” RMG, pp. 276, 280.
- 120.
Ibid.
- 121.
Ibid. See, too, AL, letter to Charles W. Collier, 12March 1940, LP 10-2, 9.
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Warren, J.L. (2016). Wildlife and the New Man. In: Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey, Tenth Anniversary Edition. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-754-4_10
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