Aldo Leopold and 21st Century Agriculture

Governor Vilsack proclaimed April 2006 as Aldo Leopold Month to honor the Iowa native for his contributions to natural resource and wildlife management. While Leopold's work in these areas has been widely recognized, his contributions to agriculture are less acclaimed.

We might assume that Leopold’s wonderful essays, written in the 1930s and 1940s, would not have much relevance for 21st century agriculture, but we would be wrong. In fact, Leopold’s visionary ideas about agriculture may be more relevant today than they were when he first proposed them. Here are several insights from Leopold that offer pragmatic solutions to some of today’s farming dilemmas.

All wilderness areas, no matter how small or imperfect, have a large value to land-science. The important thing is to realize that recreation is not their only or even their principal utility. In fact, the boundary between recreation and science, like the boundaries between park and forest, animal and plant, tame and wild, exists only in the imperfections of the human mind.

Leopold recognized that we cannot isolate wilderness from the rest of the world. In nature, everything is interconnected and interdependent. Consequently, we need wildness on our farms in order for farming to be efficient and productive. One example would be pollination by native bees, responsible for one of every three mouthfuls of the food we eat. We also know that we cannot maintain wilderness in secluded patches. Important as wilderness “preserves” are, we still lose species at an unsustainable rate. Leopold acknowledged the need for farms that are natural habitats in order to maintain vibrant wilderness areas.

The trend in animal ecology shows, with increasing clarity that all animal behavior-patterns, as well as most environmental and social relationships, are conditioned and controlled by density. I have studied animal populations for twenty years, and I have yet to find a species devoid of maximum density controls … in all species one is impressed by one common character: If one means of reduction fails, another takes over.

Leopold observed that highly specialized systems were not viable without massive energy inputs to hold back nature’s natural tendency to reduce dense populations of plants and animals. He documented how dense populations of species inevitably become vectors for pests and diseases. Given this ecological principle, it is evident that nature has given permission for our highly specialized mono-culture farming systems to thrive only by virtue of the huge infusion of technologies made affordable by the availability of cheap fossil energy. As we all know, that cheap resource will not be available much longer.

Conservation introduced the idea that the more useful wild species could be managed as crops, but the less useful ones were ignored and the predaceous ones fought, just as in the pioneering days … agencies were set up to tell us whether the red-tailed hawk, the gray gopher, the lady beetle, and the meadowlark are useful, harmless or
injurious to man.”

Leopold was wary of the effort to judge the importance of any species based on its utilitarian value. Contemporary ecologists agree with Leopold. Kevin McCann warns that “if we wish to preserve an ecosystem and its component species then we are best to proceed as if each species is sacred” because we can never determine all of the services provided by the complex inter-relationships and emergent properties of earth’s living system. As we rush ahead to introduce novel species, to simplify farm management with our new technological capabilities, we may want to ponder these ecological insights more carefully.

When the land does well for its owner, and the owner does well by his land; when both end up better by reason of their partnership, we have conservation. When one or the other grows poorer, we do not.

Leopold recognized that we will never have conservation unless we create an economy that encourages a mutually beneficial relationship between the farmer and the land. This may be one of Leopold’s most powerful insights for farmers and conservationists today. What must develop a culture of care that maintains resilience – the capacity of land for self-renewal – of the entire ecosystem, including farmland.

It was inevitable and no doubt desirable that the tremendous momentum of industrialization should have spread to farm life. It is clear to me, however, that it has overshot the mark … it is generating new insecurities, economic and ecological, in place of those it was meant to abolish. In its extreme form, it is humanly desolate and economically unstable. These extremes will some day die of their own too-much, not because they are bad for wildlife, but because they are bad for the farmer.

Given his insights into both farming and conservation, Leopold concluded that agriculture would eventually be forced to abandon its “industrial” character, attractive as it may have been. His conclusion no longer seems as revolutionary as it did in 1945, now that we’ve seen the economic ruin visited upon farmers, ecological destruction inflicted on the land, and the high cost of energy imposed on our industrial economies. Nor is it hard to believe that farming and conservation, environmental care and socio-economic well-being, must go hand in hand.

 Fred Kirschenmann