“Game Management.” This led to his now-famous
text of the same title. With its publication in 1933,
Leopold was invited to join the University of Wisconsin faculty to head a new Department of Game
Management. It was housed in an old farmhouse on
the edge of campus, with an office, lab space, and an
ever-shifting group of students and visitors.
My first introduction to Aldo Leopold came on
my 14th birthday, in 1934, when I received a copy
of Game Management—and realized that my love
of the outdoors might be combined with an actual
profession.
A few years later I was the first student biologist for
the California Department of Fish and Game, and
five years after that I was watching Japanese dignitaries sign documents of surrender. During the next
months I ordered all the back issues of the Journal
of Wildlife Management and wrote to Professor
Leopold, saying that I would be joining him in
September of 1946. And so I did, new wife and all.
With the end of WWII and the beginning of the GI
Bill, the number of Leopold’s graduate students
doubled from his preferred five. He conferred with
each student weekly, found a mutually agreeable
aspect of basic research, and drew on his assistant
Bob McCabe for appropriate ways and means. My
topic was pheasant breeding behavior.
Though Leopold’s students might banter and joke,
the Professor had no rowdy sense of humor. He was
always polite and soft-spoken. Every week he spent
an appointed hour with each graduate student, and
many Wednesday evenings there was an informal
seminar, often with a professional visitor. He was
particularly strict about making communication lucid and effective. After the evening when I had given
the seminar on my pheasant research, he sought me
out the next morning with the admonishment: “You
did not once look at the audience!”
Full text
of speech
is available
online at
www.wildlife.org.
In April of 1948 I was out in the field with my fellow
students, studying the spring mating dance of prairie chickens. We watched from blinds so as not to
disturb the birds. On April 19, as we left the blinds
and gathered for breakfast, we heard of Professor
Leopold’s death. All of us were staggered: the torch
that we had chosen to guide our steps and warm our
hearts was gone in a wink.
An Enduring Legacy
Following this loss it soon became clear that Aldo
Leopold had left an eloquent and effective legacy.
The essays he had written carried increasingly
ethical and esthetic points of view. His reviewers
emphasized the power of the personal and lyrical
elements in his writing.
Over his whole career he had puzzled over what
should be done for wildlife and who should have the
responsibility for doing it. In his Forest Service days
he had recognized that depending on a far-off headquarters to make the day-to-day decisions was not
always suited to local conditions. He even speculated that every Forest Ranger should be, ideally,
the one to understand and respond to the particular
conditions in his district.
For private lands, Leopold envisioned an ethical
duty by the landowners for the treatment of their
lands, a duty which might often conflict with immediate economic needs. Leopold developed an
ecological ethic, proposing that: “A thing is right
when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability,
and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong
when it tends otherwise.”
This idealistic message might someday be accepted
by the American public. Indeed, the inspiration of
pioneers such as Aldo Leopold encouraged the general conservation activities of subsequent years. One
human generation after his death, there was the
Earth Day of 1970; and now, one generation after
Earth Day, there has been a huge growth in conservation organizations and programs. Progress?
Yes! Even the wolf and cougar have responded to a
degree of protection.
As we head into economic difficulties, we are apt to
encounter even more tendency to ignore the philosophy of the ethical use of the lands and waters that
support us. For me, this was brought into sharp focus by a young American Indian I met on clear-cut
Vancouver Island. He said, “You know, my people
have lived here for five thousand years at least,
and on lands and waters that have stayed much
the same. Now we have you and the Canadians as
neighbors. We call you the New Americans, and as
we look at what you have done to this continent in
only two or three centuries, we have to ask you one
question: How long do you plan to stay?”
