Subject: ** Leopold: An Environmentalist Forester ** ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Comments: Aldo Leopold seems to be everywhere these days--from the pages of Environmetal Values to the Journal of Forestry. Everywhere that ecosystem management is bandied about, there will be the name Aldo Leopold. In 1981 AMERICAN FORESTS spotlighted Leopold's life and times. I picked this up from Region 3 (not sure where it started), and thought you might enjoy a quick glance at Leopold's life to compliment your copy of A Sand County Almanac (a quick reference to his ideas). 3 pages. Dave.. -------========X========------- Eco-Watch 8/18/92 LEOPOLD: AN ENVIRONMENTALIST AS FORESTER by Susan Flader, American Forests Magazine, Oct. 1981 Leopold usually referred to himself as a conservationist, using a term popularized in the early 1900s by Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot. The conservationist Pinchot put the early Forest Service squarely on the side of wise use and efficient management of resources, and was not afraid to do battle with the John Muirs and William Hornadays who were more concerned with esthetics and preservation than with management and use. To those who knew Aldo Leopold through his essays in Sand County Almanac (1949), Leopold would seem to speak to the tradition of Muir rather than of Pinchot. One who would ponder the state of mind of a skunk during a January thaw, search for tiny draba on his knees in the mud, and point with pride to all the diseased trees in his woodlot hardly seems cast in the utilitarian model of a Pinchot conservationist. With his respect for ecological diversity, his emphasis on land health, his impatience with purely economic motives for conservation, and his call for the extension of ethics to the relation between man and land, Leopold has come to be regarded as a philosopher of the new environmental movement, a movement whose current proponents are occasionally at odds with the contemporary Forest Service. Also Leopold spent the first half of his career in the Forest Service, serving from 1909-1924 in District 3 (now the Southwestern Region) and from 1924-1928 as Associate Director of the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. In 1928, he left forestry for a new career in a profession he helped establish--wildlife management. Leopold received a quick initiation into the Forest Service. He graduated from Yale Forest School in June, 1909, reported to District 3 headquarters in Albuquerque in July for a week of orientation, then was assigned to the Apache National Forest in eastern Arizona Territory as forest assistant. Arriving at Springerville in mid-July, he set immediately to studying timber sales, inspecting sawmills, scaling logs and sowing experimental seed plots--not to mention trying out a succession of horses and fishing streams. A month later he was unexpectedly transferred to a reconnaissance party to map and cruise timber in the rugged Blue Range. He set out alone through the unfamiliar terrain and lost his bearings several days before finding the field camp. Fresh out of forest school, new to the West, no experience whatsoever in reconnaissance, only 22 years old, he was expected to lead an eight-man crew composed of several seasoned locals and a few raw recruits. He summoned his bravado, plunged into the job, and delighted in writing of his rugged endurance to his family back in Burlington, Iowa. By the end of the first month, however, he confided to his sister that he was a bit worried about some recent happenings in camp: "What do you think--two of the men, Lumberjacks to boot, began to grumble this morning about the "hard life"! And this glorious fall weather too! Why damn their whining souls, wait till it begins to snow". Some months after the reconnaissance was completed and the crew disbanded, several disgruntled members preferred charges against him for incompetency and inefficiency. The Forest Service investigator concluded that many of the allegations were true: Leopold had made significant errors in running and computing the baseline, he had cruised fewer sections than other members of the crew, and there were problems with his management of the camp and his relations with other members of the party. But the fault, the investigator suggested, was as much with the Forest Service, for Leopold should never have been put in charge of the party with so little preparation. Leopold learned that the Forest Service expected discipline and efficiency, even on the frontier. Given another chance, as leader of the 1910 Apache reconnaissance, he rose to the challenge and was recommended for promotion by the district forester who was impressed with Leopold's thorough interest in all phases of forest work. Already, he had begun to develop ideas for wildlife conservation and studies of watershed conditions. In 1911, he was transferred to the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico as deputy supervisor. Here, among other things, he began nurturing his writing skill on the Pine Cone, a forest newsletter. One of his contributions, titled "The Busy Season", reveals the utilitarian-forester in his make-up: "There's many a crooked, rocky trail, That we'd like all straight and free, There's many a mile of forest aisle, Where a fire sign ought to be. There's many a pine tree on the range, In sooth, they are tall and straight. But what we want to know is this, What will they estimate? There's many a cow-brute on the range, And her life is wild and free, But can she look at you and say, She's paid the grazing fee? The Carson was one of the more important forest in the Southwest, but it was in terrible shape. Something like 200,000 sheep were being run on the forest, and many of the owners were hostile to the Forest Service. Eroded gullies were so deep, that Leopold often had to backtrack miles before he could cross. The management challenge was to establish a system of individual allotments, to locate sheep driveways and lambing grounds, to count sheep by the thousands, and to patrol to catch trespassers who were running unpermitted stock. Leopold made good on the job, and in just one year was promoted to supervisor. The course of Leopold's life was changed by a bout with acute nephritis, a kidney disease resulting from exposure on a long arduous field trip in April 1913. He required 18 months of convalescence at home in Iowa. He finally had time to reflect on the meaning of Forest Service work and shared his thoughts with the Carson staff in a series of letters in the Pine Cone. "After many days of much riding down among thickets of detail and box canyons of routine, it sometimes profits as man to top out on the high ridge leave without pay, and to take a look around...The reason for all our routine is greater efficiency in the protection and development of the resources of the forest. But what was the measure of success? My measure is THE EFFECT ON THE FOREST." The problem as he saw it was that forest officers too easily fell into a rut of routine, following the prescribed uniform procedure for each administrative task without stopping to consider what would be the effect on the forest. The point he tried to make was the necessity for clear, untrammeled and independent thinking by the foresters who were responsible for translating policies to discern the effect on the forest. Thus his first few years in the Southwest established the pattern. Leopold was enamored of Forest Service life and committed to efficient management, yet he was always reaching beyond to the larger questions. Whether he was administering game protection, recreation, fire control or grazing or even personnel, he mastered the details in order to nudge the Forest Service toward a broader-based environmental concern. When he returned to work in Albuquerque headquarters after his convalescence, he began organizing game and fish protection--"setting an example to the whole country," as Theodore Roosevelt wrote him in a congratulatory letter. If the Forest Service could organize local associations of cattlemen and woolgrowers to promote more efficient management of livestock on forest range, why not do the same for game and fish? If timber could be scientifically managed for sustained-yield harvest, rather than wantonly cut, why not develop similar techniques for production of game and fish in the wild? Leopold calculated that game could bring nearly as much income to the region as timber or grazing uses of the forest, if enough effort, intelligence and money were committed to develop the resource. Leopold's administrative preoccupations illustrate both his adherence to the prevailing Forest Service utilitarian conservation ideology and his reaching out to a broader environmental perspective. As he travelled over forests on inspection trips, he noticed more than the condition of roads, trails, fire lookouts and diaries. He was impressed by changes that he had seen on the forests he had known as a young field man--forests like the Apache, Gila and Carson. He observed evidence of soil erosion in small mountain valleys; the continuing replacement of grass by impenetrable often unpalatable brush on the foothills; and the growth of yellow pine in dense, stunted thickets instead of in majestic grassy stands. He explored environmental relationships and questioned time-honored dogmas of forestry: that all fire is intrinsically destructive; that grazing inhibits fire, that stands of timber and brush are the best bulwark against flooding and erosion. In the decade after he left the Forest Service, there was a subtle shift in Leopold's intellectual orientation from broadly economic conservation to conservation of the biotic system for sustained functioning and internal renewal--what we called "land health". This transition is most obvious in his writings on wildlife, including "Escudilla" (1940) and "Thinking like a Mountain" (1944). Aldo Leopold never lost the conservation viewpoint he developed in the Forest Service. The respect for wise use and efficient, scientific management of resources remained just as important to him under an ecological as under an economic premise, for they were now means to the end of land health. He was both a conservationist and an environmentalist, and in that combination lay his enduring strength.