D e s e r t   E x p o s u r e   August 2009

In 1912, the year New Mexico became a state, Leopold was promoted to Supervisor of the Carson National Forest. "For the first time in his young career," write David E. Brown and Neil E. Carmody in Aldo Leopold's Southwest, "Leopold was faced with solving the problems of unhealthy land: overgrazed meadows, erosion gullies and a lack of game."

Unlike the remote Apache National Forest — which not long ago had belonged to the indomitable Indians of its name — the Carson was closer to civilization and the collision between preserving wilderness and Pinchot's philosophy of "wise use." Under President Theodore Roosevelt, the nation's Forest Reserves had more than doubled, from 63 million to 150 million acres. Pinchot, the foremost proponent of "scientific management" of forests, renamed those 150 million acres "National Forests." And forests, unlike "reserves," were meant to be used.

"Conservation," Pinchot declared, "means the wise use of the earth and its resources for the lasting good of men."

Initially, Leopold adopted Pinchot's association of forest management with the march of American progress. He loved his job, Leopold wrote to his mother in 1909, because "it deals with big things. Millions of acres, billions of feet of timber, all vast amounts of capital. . . . Why, it's fun to twiddle them around in your fingers. I want to handle these 15 million [board feet] a year sales when they come. That would be something."

But that ardor began to cool, according to Newton, as the newly married Supervisor embraced his job in the Carson National Forest: "Yet even as he vigorously plotted timber cuts in the forests and enjoyed his new home life, Leopold became increasingly aware of the tensions between the limits to the land's bounty and the march of civilization. New settlers were rapidly changing the land. He could see it happening all around. . . . After a year on the Carson, Leopold was having disturbing dreams about land problems and his responsibility to do well by both the forest he managed and the people who depended on it."

In 1913, however, Leopold found himself grappling instead with a serious kidney infection. Recuperating with a pregnant Estella back in Burlington, he read Our Vanishing Wild Life by William Temple Hornaday, director of the New York Zoological Society and founder of the Permanent Wild Life Protection Fund. Hornaday's description of the decline in wildlife fed Leopold's own growing concerns about game management. In an article mailed back to the Carson Pine Cone, the Forest Service newsletter he'd founded, Leopold urged his fellow foresters to think independently and question the agency's policies. All their efforts, he wrote, should be judged by "THE EFFECT ON THE FOREST."

Leopold was finally well enough to return to New Mexico in February 1914, with Estella and new son Starker. But he remained on unpaid leave, and in May the Forest Service laid him off. His pal Ringland managed to find him an Albuquerque desk job in October, pushing paperwork for grazing permits. That was replaced the next year with a newly created position — Ringland again — in public relations, which Leopold took and ran with.

After interviewing district rangers, Leopold produced the Forest Service's first Game and Fish Handbook. Liberally interpreting his "public relations" mandate, he pushed for the creation of game-protection societies and became secretary of the new, thousand-member New Mexico Game Protective Association. Shortly after Leopold's 30th birthday, Theodore Roosevelt write him a note of congratulations on the work of the Albuquerque Game Protective Association: "I think your platform simply capital. . . . It seems your association in New Mexico is setting an example to the whole country."

The First World War rearranged the nation's priorities, however; more grazing permits were demanded for beef to feed the troops. Leopold, his health still too poor to serve, resigned from the Forest Service in January 1918 to take a job promoting the city of Albuquerque. He produced a quarterly bulletin, Forward Albuquerque (while continuing to edit the Carson Pine Cone).

Not surprisingly, as the war wound down, Leopold was soon back with the Forest Service, jumping to the second-highest job in District 3 — Assistant Forester in Charge of Operations. His new job, according to Lorbiecki, led him to examine each forest in the district "with the intensity of a scientist. The closer Leopold looked, the more he saw that made him uneasy" — overgrazing, poor logging practices, erosion. Of the 30 forests he inspected, 27 suffered from serious erosion and loss of topsoil.

A trip back to the scene of his first, unsuccessful assignment — the Blue Range and its Blue River in the Apache National Forest, along the Arizona-New Mexico border — dramatically illustrated for Leopold the failings of a gung-ho, Manifest Destiny approach to land management. By the spring of 1921, the Blue River valley was almost unrecognizable from the wild region he'd visited 12 years before. Tree clearing, livestock grazing and irrigation diversion had paved the way for historic flash flooding and widespread erosion. The once-lush bottomland, Leopold recorded, was now "mostly boulders, with a few shelves of original bottomland left high and dry between rocky points."

He gathered statistics to document the changes that had swept — literally — through the Blue River area. In 1900, the valley had held 4,000 tillable acres and was home to 300 people on 45 ranches. By the time of Leopold's survey in 1921, all but 300 acres had been lost to erosion, and the valley supported only 90 people on 21 shrunken ranches; 34 established homes had been destroyed. The land necessary to utilize a half-million acres of adjacent mountain land, he concluded, was gone.

His 1921 Blue River tour crystallized for Leopold the fundamental importance of soil to productivity and conservation in the Southwest. The previous winter, he'd expressed this dawning conclusion in a speech at the University of Arizona's Farmers' Week: "The destruction of soil is the most fundamental kind of economic loss which the human race can suffer. . . . if the soil is gone, the loss is absolute and irrevocable."

According to Newton, "The devastation in the Blue River lands made a powerful impression on Leopold. The test of true civilizations, he was realizing, was whether it could endure, whether its citizens could prosper for generations in a place. By this measure the settlement along the Blue River had failed. Yet to call the settlement a failure was merely to prompt new questions — about the land, about the nation's institutions and values, and about the conservation ideas he had been taught."

In an article published that same year in the Journal of Forestry, Leopold began to argue for a new conception of wilderness and to more openly question the legacy of Forest Service founder Gifford Pinchot. He urged his Forest Service colleagues to define wilderness as a "continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks' pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages or other works of man."

More 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."

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.

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