D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
August 2009
Learning to Think Like a Mountain
Aldo Leopold's arrival in the Southwest, 100 years ago, began a change in ideas about what land is for.
By David A. Fryxell
Aldo Leopold might not recognize the Southwest as the same place where he began his career as a forester, conservationist and author 100 years ago.
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Aldo Leopold in later years in Wisconsin. (Aldo Leopold Centennial Celebration) |
Although still thick with forests and rich with wilderness — thanks in part to Leopold — the New Mexico and Arizona that he knew is now bisected by interstate highways, strung with power lines and dotted with suburbs and exurbs. Albuquerque, where the newly minted Yale graduate stepped off the train in July 1909 for his orientation at the District 3 headquarters of the US Forest Service, is no longer a sleepy town of adobe haciendas and dusty plazas. Its Rio Grande Park, which Leopold helped establish, now houses a zoo and aquarium.
You no longer have to endure a bumpy, two-day stagecoach ride from the train stop at Holbrook, Ariz., to Springerville, just across the border from New Mexico at the foot of Escudilla Mountain — as Leopold did a century ago, arriving on July 18, 1909. Highways now whisk refugees from the Phoenix summer swelter into the cool green of the mountains where Leopold started his first job — forest assistant for the recently created Apache National Forest.
Certainly, Leopold would be surprised to discover a wilderness area named after him, preserving 202,016 acres north of Silver City. Established in 1980, the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Area straddles the crest of the Black Range and encompasses the most untamed and rugged swath of those mountains. Across Forest Road 150, it adjoins the even larger Gila Wilderness Area, established in 1924 as the nation's first designated wilderness area — thanks to Aldo Leopold. That landmark wilderness designation, for which Leopold is now known as "the father of the National Forest Wilderness System," was achieved even as he was leaving the Southwest, after only 15 years, for Wisconsin. Between 1924 and his death in 1948, Leopold would return only intermittently to the area where his career had begun. But the "fierce green fire" he first encountered here would continue to shape his thinking.
And the controversies that still split this region would seem all too familiar to Aldo Leopold, a century after his arrival here. He would instantly recognize the debate over "wise use" and "multiple uses" of forest and wilderness lands. The simmering strife over the reintroduction of the Mexican gray wolf would resonate with Leopold's own evolution of attitudes about predators. He might not know what "ATV" stands for, but the conflict between access by motorized vehicles and wilderness preservation would echo the very origins of his Gila Wilderness — prompted by the threat of a proposed road cutting through the forest.
We continue today to grapple with the central challenge of Leopold's career as a conservationist: "how to live on the land without spoiling it," as his biographer Marybeth Lorbiecki puts it in Aldo Leopold: A Fierce Green Fire. She adds, "In his life and writings, he came closer than most of us will ever come. That is, unless we too let the land settle into our bones."
Leopold's legacy and the contemporary relevance of his ideas are being celebrated throughout this centennial year of his arrival in the Southwest. Next month, the Aldo Leopold Centennial begins a busy fall with a conference in Nutrioso, Ariz., "In the Footsteps of Leopold," Sept. 5-7, sponsored by the White Mountain Conservation organization. That will be followed by the Fifth Annual Gila River Festival, Sept. 17-20, in and around Silver City, with the theme, "Celebrating 100 Years of Aldo Leopold's Legacy in the Southwest." (See box.)
According to the sponsoring Gila Conservation Coalition, "The festival will bring together experts and laypersons, artists and scientists from many disciplines to foster an appreciation of Aldo Leopold and the importance of his conservation ethic to the protection of the Gila River through an understanding of his influences on the creation of the National Wilderness Preservation System, his relationship to the wild places he loved, and the legacy of wildness he represents."
Here in our corner of the Southwest, of course, we recognize Aldo Leopold's name from everything from the wilderness area honoring him to a Silver City charter school. Elsewhere, however, despite Leopold's founding of the wilderness system and the Wilderness Society and his authorship of the first textbook on game management, notwithstanding even his classic A Sand Country Almanac, he's hardly a household name.
"The majority of Americans have not yet been introduced to this person who has been so influential in their lives," Lorbiecki observes in the introduction to her biography. "Perhaps he was involved in too many aspects of the conservation movement to be pigeonholed into an easily remembered historical slot. Perhaps he has not joined Thoreau in American folk history because his writings challenge cultural rather than just individual assumptions: He wrote that 'to change ideas about what land is for is to change ideas about what anything is for.'"
Born in Burlington, Iowa, on Jan. 11, 1887, Rand Aldo Leopold (the first name was quickly dropped after the Leopolds had a spat with the Rands) took to the great outdoors "even in his extreme youth," his sister Marie recalled. "He was always out climbing around the bluffs, or going down to the river, or going across the river into the woods." His father, Carl, took the boy hunting about the time Aldo was old enough to start school: "It would be difficult to exterminate from my mind," Aldo Leopold would later write, "the August landscape in which I took my first hunting trip, trailing after my father. The dried-up cowtracks. . . looked to me like small chasms, and the purple-topped ironweeds like tall trees."
Though his first language was German, as in many immigrant families, Aldo learned English before beginning elementary school. His classroom lessons were supplemented by his grandfather, Charles Starker, who taught the boy gardening and birdwatching. Aldo began a lifelong practice of keeping journals, many of them illustrated.
In 1900, when Aldo Leopold was a young teenager, Gifford Pinchot — the first head of the US Forest Service — founded the nation's first school of forestry at his alma mater, Yale University. The young Leopold's destiny was set. Resisting his father's urgings to join the family business, the Leopold Desk Co., Aldo headed east in January 1904 to a college-prep high school that could ready him for Yale.
At the Lawrenceville School in Pennsylvania, according to Lorbiecki, "Aldo seized every opportunity to promote the cause of conservation. He sprung traps in the woods and revived dying fish from a drained campus pond."
From Lawrenceville he went on to Yale, first as an undergraduate and then, at age 22, achieving his goal of a Master of Forestry degree. In Aldo Leopold's Odyssey, Julianne Lutz Newton writes, "He was proud to be counted among the nation's first scientifically trained foresters, and he dreamed of one day being supervisor of a public forest covering thousands, even millions, of acres. Just before graduation, a classmate had remarked, 'I'd rather be a Supervisor than the King of England.' Leopold heartily agreed."
His first assignment upon arriving in the Southwest as a Forest Assistant, however, suggested that Leopold might be no more likely to make Supervisor than King. The greenhorn forester quickly acquired a horse, a feisty gray stallion named Jiminy Hicks, and a dog, Flip, took up pipe smoking and got a brace of pistols. Then he set out to lead a reconnaissance crew to map and inventory the Blue Range of the Apache National Forest. According to Newton, "Not only did he make serious computational errors, Leopold also managed and offended his men with an overconfident attitude."
Nonetheless, under the tutelage of District Chief Arthur Ringland, a fellow Yalie only a few years older, Leopold survived and even thrived in his remote post. Leopold wrote to his mother, "Why I wouldn't trade it for anything else under the sun. Please don't think that every time I tell you of having 'laid out' overnight or doing a full day's work that I am to be pitied on that account. Jiminy Crickets — it's part of the job. . . . Ten times as much roughing it would not be too big a price to pay for the privilege of wearing a flannel shirt and of not being obliged [to] fight society and all the forty 'leven kinds of Tommyrot that includes."
| For more information on "In the Footsteps of Aldo Leopold," a 100th anniversary conference in the White Mountains, Sept. 5-7, email ruwinn@nmsu.edu or see azwmcl.org To learn more about the Aldo Leopold Centennial Celebration and upcoming events, see www.leopoldcelebration.org |
He loved the work — and the work soon led Leopold to another sort of love. On a temporary assignment in Albuquerque in March 1911, he and Ringland met two of the seven Bergere sisters in a drugstore. Ringland, who knew the ladies, made introductions, and soon the two bachelor foresters were invited to a cotillion at the Bergere ranch near Santa Fe. Dancing with Estella Bergere, Leopold was immediately smitten.
His boss and buddy, Ringland, obligingly found a new assignment for Leopold, as Deputy Supervisor of the Carson National Forest. The northern New Mexico forest was conveniently closer to Estella Bergere. That summer, Leopold sent her his pin from the foresters fraternity, the Society of Robin Hood, with a note: "In this little pin is more than half my life." By November, they were engaged.