D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
August 2009
Aldo Leopold
Page: 3More heretical still, Leopold suggested that the "highest use" of wilderness was not necessarily industrial or commercial, logging or grazing. Given the public's growing interest in getting "back to nature," he wrote, the government should preserve "a little nature to get back to." In serving the public, the Forest Service ought to consider the whole populace — not just the public that owned timber mills and cattle.
Leopold closed his article with a radical proposal: to set aside the high box-canyon reaches of the Gila National Forest, which had been established in 1905, as a new sort of national wilderness. This Gila wilderness area exemplified the rugged mountain lands of the Southwest. It was, Leopold pointed out, the last such area remaining within the forest system: "It will be much easier and cheaper to preserve, by forethought. . . than to create it after it is gone."
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The Gila Wilderness, which Leopold
founded, rises in the distance beyond Bear Creek, as seen from the Casitas
de Gila in fall. (Photo by David Cortner) |
Pushing ahead without waiting for permission, Leopold had his proposed 750,000-acre wilderness, near the Gila River's headwaters in the Mogollon Mountains, surveyed. He recommended to Frank C.W. Pooler, his new boss in District 3, a moratorium on new grazing permits and construction within the tract. Pooler, who'd initially been skeptical of his operations assistant, was impressed with the "painstaking detail" of Leopold's "comprehensive work."
Leopold's tour of southwestern forests had also led him to rethink another Forest Service tenet — that fire, thought of as "the scourge of all living things," was not always the worst thing that could happen to a forest. In a 1923 essay, he wrote: "All our existing knowledge in forestry indicates very strongly that overgrazing has done far more damage to the Southwest than fires or cuttings." He pointed out that a century of fires — without grazing — had not spoiled the Sapello, a stream in the Gila National Forest, "but a decade of grazing without fires ruined it."
But just as Leopold's revolutionary ideas about wilderness and managing the forests of the Southwest were gaining attention, his tenure in this corner of America abruptly ended. William Greeley, who'd succeeded Pinchot as head of the Forest Service, had been pressuring Leopold to move to Madison, Wisc., as assistant director of the Forest Products Laboratory. Finally, with the promise of the director's job once the incumbent resigned within the year, Leopold agreed.
His friends and colleagues in New Mexico were stunned. The Albuquerque Game Protective Association threw Leopold a gala going-away party and presented him with a pocket watch and a shotgun.
But a watch and a shotgun weren't all that Leopold had to commemorate his time in the Southwest. Five days after Leopold left New Mexico for Wisconsin, on June 3, 1924, Pooler approved his proposal to establish the Gila Wilderness Area.
The rest of Aldo Leopold's life and career would be tightly intertwined with Wisconsin, far removed both geographically and ecologically from the forests of the Southwest. But it was here, in New Mexico and Arizona, where Leopold's philosophy began to develop — and where the seeds of his challenge to the conventional conservation wisdom were planted.
One return trip, in the fall of 1936, would cement Leopold's thinking and alter how he viewed the land for the rest of his life. That hunting expedition with a friend took him deeper into the Southwest than before, to the unspoiled Sierra Madre range and its lush Rio Gavilan valley in Chihuahua, Mexico. He wrote of hearing "music in these hills" on that trip, "a vast pulsing harmony — its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and centuries."
On that Sierra Madre journey, according to biographer Lorbiecki, "the pieces of the puzzle Leopold had been working on all his life fell into place. He realized that most of his life he had seen only sick land. Only in Mexico had he come upon land communities, or biotas, that were still in perfect health." As Leopold put it, "The term 'unspoiled wilderness' took on new meaning."
It would be one more lesson Leopold would take away from the rugged Southwest. From then on, his focus shifted from fixing damaged lands to saving America's scant remaining "unspoiled wilderness" from the march of civilization. This was not mere sentimentality for Leopold, but science: "Every region should retain representative samples of its original wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land science study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land mechanism."
This protection, he argued, must extend even to predators, where Leopold's thinking came around 180 degrees. At the American Game Conference of 1920, he had urged the eradication of all wolves and mountain lions. Now he wrote, "The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?' If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not." In another piece, he argued, "You cannot love game and hate predators. . . . The land is one organism."
Leopold dramatized his change of heart and mind in an essay written in 1944, "Thinking Like a Mountain," in which he recalled yet another experience from his time in the Southwest. He wrote, "Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf. Those unable to decipher the hidden meaning know nevertheless that it is there, for it is felt in all wolf country, and distinguishes that country from all other land."
His own conviction about "thinking like a mountain," Leopold went on, dated from the day he watch a wolf die in the Apache National Forest. While eating lunch on a rimrock, he and his companions spotted a mother wolf climbing a bank towards them, followed by a half-dozen pups. "In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack."
Leopold wrote, "We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes — something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing that green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view."
In the ensuing years, Leopold had seen wolves eradicated from state after state. He'd watched ranchers "take over the wolf's job of trimming the herd to fit the range." Those cowmen had not learned to think like a mountain, he realized.
"Too much safety yields only danger in the long run," Leopold concluded, then quoted Henry David Thoreau's phrase, "In wildness is the salvation of the world."
"Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf," Leopold wrote, "long known among mountains, but seldom preserved among men."
The "Thinking Like a Mountain" essay was included in a collection, A Sand Country Almanac, for which Leopold found a publisher in April 1948. The book would not be an academic work or a sustained ecological argument, but rather an account of Leopold's awakening to the importance of things "natural, wild and free" — an awakening that had begun in the rough forests and high ranges of the Southwest, far from his Midwestern roots.
One week after getting the book contract from Oxford University Press, on April 21, 1948, Aldo Leopold died of a heart attack while helping a neighbor fight a grass fire on his Wisconsin farm.
Reaching print only after his death, A Sand Country Almanac has sold more than 2 million copies. Only three of the essays therein, collected in a section titled "Sketches Here and There," are set in New Mexico and Arizona, plus another three from Chihuahua and Sonora, Mexico. But every word reflects the lessons in "thinking like a mountain" that Aldo Leopold learned after stepping off that train in Albuquerque, 100 years ago.
David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.