June 5, 2023: Environmental Activisms: Aldo Leopold

[Thissummer, my older son is extending hisprior efforts to help combat climate change by interning with the amazing ClimateJust Cities project. That project is part of the long legacy of Americanenvironmental activism, so this week I’ll highlight a handful of suchactivisms. Leading up to a special weekend post on Climate Just Cities!]

On three importantenvironmental concepts to which the pioneeringconservationist connects.

1)     Forestry at Yale: In1900, when Leopold was just 13 years old, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Divisionof Forestry director GiffordPinchot donated money to Yale to start the nation’s firstdedicated graduate forestry school. That program became young Leopold’sdream destination, and after a series of necessary steps (including attending preparatoryschool in New Jersey and completing undergraduate requirements at New Haven’s Sheffield ScientificSchool) he made it to Yale, and went on to be the poster boy for this newtype of academic conservationism. This was the era when manyscholarly disciplines were becoming more organized around academic study,but of course the very idea that forestry was a scholarly discipline waslikewise new, and a vital part of Leopold’s own career and arc.  

2)     GameManagement: Another longstanding conservationist idea that transformed intoa scholarly discipline in the course of Leopold’s lifetime was wildlife management.And indeed, in this case Leopold was a pioneering figure in thattransformation, as his 1933 appointment as Professor of Game Managementin the University of Wisconsin’s Agricultural Economics Department (itself the first such specialized department in theworld) made him the first such professor in the nation. Long ago I wrote for myTalking Points Memo column about the interconnections between big gamehunting and American history, and would note that the creation of such positionsand departments reflects an even more important shift when we locate themwithin that larger collective context.

3)     An Ecological Conscience: Those kinds ofcommunal programs and disciplines provide important contexts for Leopold’scareer, and indeed were likewise influenced by him. But ironically, it’s in atext published just after his 1948 death that Leopold’s own most influentialideas were developed. Leopold spent the last decades of his life living incentral Wisconsin’s so-called sand county (or sandprairie), an area that had been over-logged and -farmed, devastated byfires, and left largely barren by the mid-20th century. Throughouthis time there Leopold was working on the book that he completed not longbefore passing and that was published in 1949 as ASand County Almanac. The whole book explores Leopold’s “Land Ethic” (ashe termed it), but the section entitled “TheEcological Conscience” most directly expresses what he means: “In short, aland ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from the conqueror of theland-community to plain member and citizen of it.” That’s an environmentalperspective we could still much better hear and learn from.

Next environmentalactivism tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? American environmental voices or efforts you’d highlight?