Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

Guest Column: Following Leopold into your own wilderness

Back to Leopold Letter Summer 2009

By DEVAN McGRANAHAN, Special to the Leopold Letter

By most measures, the first day had been a failure. Out of shape, out of breath, and nearly out of daylight, I stumbled across a meadow towards the first trail sign in hours.

I learned that the camp I had set my sights on was still several miles away, and I felt my heart sink. No amount of anticipation for this hike was able to offset the fatigue induced by three days and nights of driving and sleeping in the pickup, or the breathlessness of climbing beyond 9,000 feet after a winter stuck in a basement lab in Iowa. I was resigned to sloughing off my pack not eight miles from the trailhead, just inside the boundary of the vast wilderness.

This year marks 100 years since Aldo Leopold began his career in the Southwest, and I decided that a celebration was in order. Thus, I put together a Southwestern adventure of my own, starting with the annual Society for Range Management conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Not only are the SRM meetings an important event for an aspiring rangeland ecologist, but this year they were being held in the heart of Leopold’s former country.

On the same trip, I was able to spend a week backpacking in the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, a subset of the Gila National Forest that Leopold himself tapped for designation as our country’s first wilderness area back in the early 1920s.

While most Leopold pilgrims seek out his beloved Shack on the Wisconsin “sand farm,” having grown up on a farm in Iowa I already was familiar with the agricultural landscape that he nurtured in his later years. I am interested in the early Leopold: the man who himself explicitly advocated the extermination of wolves in the name of wildlife, long before describing, with sincere regret, the now-fabled “fierce green fire” he witnessed die in a mother wolf’s eyes just after he and his friends unloaded their rifles on her. I wanted to see the land where Leopold cut his teeth, straight out of college, the land where he learned to think, write, and above all, learn from his mistakes.

Leopold’s wilderness
Leopold was one of the earliest modern advocates of wilderness, by which he meant “a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state ... big enough to absorb a two weeks’ pack trip...” Upon establishing my camp embarrassingly close to the boundary of the wilderness that bears his name, I wondered whether or not he would consider me soft. But as I settled down beside a roaring fire with a cup of tea and a hot supper, I began to think more expansively. What did Leopold mean by wilderness? How deep into it must one go to develop an ecological conscience?

I stirred the fire with a stick and my thoughts with some whisky, and ultimately decided that I probably didn’t need to be there at all. Leopold never insisted that we actually had to go into the wilderness to appreciate it; in fact, he specifically spoke to the opposite: “Is my share of Alaska worthless to me because I shall never go there?” Leopold advocated that we appreciate what wilderness was like; he understood that it would not be the same for all.

That night I began to wonder if I hadn’t already had a wilderness experience. I spent my first year out of college traveling from farm to farm across southern Africa, learning how wildlife conservation is practiced on private rangelands. Southern Africa was a wilderness, of sorts, in that everything was foreign to me and I had to build not only my day-to-day living but also my thinking from the ground up. I had to be quick with observation and insight to put it all together.

And like Leopold, I made my fair share of mistakes, overlooking an important aspect of grass physiology in a report on grazing management, and even slightly misrepresenting Leopold himself in an article for a farmer’s newsletter.

Relieved of the pressure to strike deep into the forest to understand Leopold’s wilderness, I was now free to reflect in the sunshine of my suddenly cozy meadow and think through Leopold, not just about him. Readers familiar with Leopold’s nature essays might be taken aback to discover how progressive Leopold’s social criticism was.

For example, in an early version of “The Land Ethic,” Leopold basically predicts organic and fair-trade labeling and government certification, appealing to the role of the consumer conscience in guiding the marketplace towards sustainability: “Must we view forever the irony of educating our sons with paper, the offal of which pollutes the rivers which they need quite [as] badly as books? Would not many people pay an extra penny for a ‘clean’ newspaper? Government may some day busy itself with the legitimacy of labels used by land-use industries to distinguish conservation products, rather than with the attempt to operate their lands for them.”

Prescription for a sustainable future
In this manner, Leopold is as relevant today as he was 70 years ago. I see people of my generation referring to Leopold’s philosophies as prescriptions for a more sustainable future.

For example, as my wife ponders how landscape photography can contribute to our understanding of ecological processes from the point of view of Leopold’s land ethic, she reminds us how Leopold encouraged us to include in our definition of science “the creation and exercise of wonder, of respect for workmanship in nature.” From the scientific side, Leopold recognized that “few wildlife managers have any intent or desire to contribute to art and literature, yet the ecological dramas which we must discover ... are inferior only to the human drama as subject matter for the fine arts...”

Likewise, when my colleague here at Iowa State, Travis Cox, seeks to describe how a society can use ecology as a broad but fundamental framework for defining sustainability, he finds clarity in Leopold’s observation that “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.” After all, “no ‘language’ adequate for portraying the land mechanism exists in any science or art, save only ecology. A language is imperative, for if we are to guide land-use we must talk sense to farmer and economist, pioneer and poet, stockman and philosopher, lumberjack and geographer, engineer and historian.” Leopold mentions “love” four times in “The Land Ethic.”

I challenge all of us to revisit Leopold, even if it is for the first time. Remember that the man is far from infallible, a point that I find makes him much more trustworthy. And although reading about the bears and the wolves of the High Country has a certain aesthetic when one does it beside a campfire in New Mexico, I believe that we all will find Aldo Leopold wherever our wilderness might be.

Back to Leopold Letter Summer 2009