A Sand Country Almanac: Aldo Leopold Aldo Leopold, thought of as the father of wildlife conservation, is best known as the author of the 1949 book “A Sand County Almanac”. Aldo articulates an idea called “land ethic” which holds the right of the soils, waters, animals, and plants to a life in a natural state. While this doesn’t prevent the people that misuse these resources, it does declare that the ecosystem will only work as a whole. Aldo uses illustrative descriptions of nature within his book, and stories from his own life to argue for conservation of the natural world. Aldo writes for his book for the average citizen, because he realizes that only a collective change will help preserve the land. Aldo suggests that because conservation …show more content…
Aldo grew up in a mansion that sat upon a ridge that looked over the Mississippi River. At a young age, Aldo’s father would take him out into nature and that’s where he developed his love for hunting, wood crafting and spending hours exploring the river, mountains, and woods. With the river being walking distance from his home, Aldo and his father would go down and explore the migrating geese and ducks as the Mississippi river serves as a pathway for these migrating waterfowl. Aldo was described as a shy kid but he was very smart. He loved to read and learn all about animals and the great outdoors. Aldo attended Burlington High School before heading off to Lawrenceville School hoping to one day attend Yale University to study forestry. He attended Lawrenceville School for only a year before getting accepted in to Yale. Aldo eventually graduated from Yale with a Master’s Degree in Forestry. As soon as he graduated, he joined the United States Forest Service where he got assigned to assist in managing the New Mexico and Arizona areas. In 1911, Aldo was transferred to the northern region of Arizona where he helped develop the first management plan for the Grand Canyon. He would stay there until 1924 when he was again transferred to the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin as the associate director. Years later, he became the Professor of Game Management in the Agricultural Economics Department which was known as the first professorship for wildlife management. In 1939, Aldo was elected chairman of the new Department of Wildlife Management at the University of Wisconsin. Four years later, a governor appointed Aldo to serve a six-year term in the Wisconsin Conservation Commission. Aldo passed away due to a sudden heart attack in 1948 while fighting a wildfire on a neighbors land. His book “ A Sand Country Almanac” was edited and published by Aldo’s son after Aldo passed. Throughout
Although Leopold’s love of great expanses of wilderness is readily apparent, his book does not cry out in defense of particular tracts of land about to go under the axe or plow, but rather deals with the minutiae, the details, of often unnoticed plants and animals, all the little things that, in our ignorance, we have left out of our managed acreages but which must be present to add up to balanced ecosystems and a sense of quality and wholeness in the landscape.
Cronon, William “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995, 69-90
Leopold would most likely approve of the work being done to preserve Gorongosa National Park and would agree with Wilson in that nature is our home and we should treat it as such, but Leopold, unlike Wilson, argues that it is our moral obligation, and not just our pleasure, to respect nature. Additionally, Wilson seems to focus specifically on the plants and animals that make up an ecosystem, but Leopold extends his focus to non-living components such as soil and water because they are instrumental in maintaining the integrity of land communities. Leopold might urge Wilson to make sure that he is not simply educating people at Gorongosa, but really help them genuinely understand land ethics. This way, humans can evolve a sense of praise and approval for preserving the integrity and beauty of the biotic community (262), and social disapproval for doing the exact
In my generation, I am able to catch what is relatively the tail end of this slow extinction. And to be quite honest, I had not devoted a moment of thought to this phenomenon until I read Leopold’s passages. In fact, I am always the first one to compliment a new highway project that saves me five minutes of driving or even a tidy farmstead as I pass. Now, more than ever, my thoughts are in limbo. It was just last week when my dad pointed out an area off the highway that displayed miles of slowly rolling cornfields. His reaction was to the beauty of the countryside. Mine was to question his. I found myself thinking about all of the hard work that created that beauty, and then how much more beautiful it was fifty, a hundred, or even two centuries ago. Only the mind’s eye can create this beauty now, and that is exactly why Leopold’s concerns are validated.
In his journal, Thoreau muses upon twenty years of changes in New England’s land and beasts. He lists the differences in plants and animals, comparing them to past accounts and descriptions. He questions if the growing human presence has resulted in “a maimed and imperfect nature.” Cronon believes that this is an important question to consider. He points out that although changes do happen in nature, it is not so easy to determine how they changed. He is also not sure if Thoreau’s description of “a maimed and imperfect nature” is the correct way to refer to ecology, since it is by its essence, a fluid system of changes and reactions. Cronon does not deny the impact of
Executive Director and served from 1952 until 1969. He also served on their Board of Directors
John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and Aldo Leopold all have moderately different views and ideas about the environment in terms of its worth, purpose, use and protection. At one extensively non-anthropocentric extreme, Muir’s views and ideas placed emphasis on protecting environmental areas as a moral obligation. That is to say, Muir believed that wilderness environments should be used for divine transcendence, spiritual contemplation, as a place for repenting sins and obtaining devotional healing, rather than being used for exploitative materialistic greed and destructive consumption, such as industrialism, mining, and lumbering. At the other extreme, anthropocentric, Pinchot views nature simply as natural resources. In other words, nature is explicitly
The entire letter was written on the premise that nature should be saved for the sake of the thought, not for what it could tactilely do for people. If you are going to have a clear-cut, concise idea about what nature is, enough of one for it to be a sobering idea, you would have to be out there in it at some point. You may have a thought but you don’t know and therefore it isn’t what is holding you together as a whole. The letter has some genuine concerns for the wildlife and forests and the wilderness itself, but it is just that, a letter voicing Wallace Stegner’s concerns.
I think that in this chapter Leopold is showing the reader how the different people see the land and the things in and around that land. He also tells us that even the conservation commission feels impelled to kill animals and birds to help the production of a lesser species.
In Thinking Like a Mountain, the author, Aldo Leopold, writes of the importance of wildlife preservation through examples of the symbiotic relationship of animals and plant-life with a mountain. He asks the reader to perceive the processes of a mountainous environment in an unusual way. Aldo Leopold wants the reader to "think" like a mountain instead of thinking of only the immediate, or as the hunter did. Taking away one feature of an ecosystem may eventually destroy everything else that that environment is composed of. Nature and wildness is essential for the well being of life on this earth.
The purpose of this paper is to inform you about John Muir and his effect on America's national forests. He was a Scottish American and was born in Dunbar, UK on April 21, 1838. He arrived in the U.S in 1868 when he was 30 years of age. John Muir was one of the most influential naturalists in the world. If it wasn't for John Muir we probably would not have the national park known as Yosemite. Some of his goals in the U.S. were the preservations of the national forests. He was an environmental philosopher and did well for the U.S. national parks. John Muir founded the Sierra Club, an American organization and the 211-mile trail called the Sierra Nevada was named in his honor.(John Muir, wikipedia)
Since the rise of the American environmental romanticism the idea of preservation and conservation have been seen as competing ideologies. Literary scholars such as Thoreau and Muir have all spoke to the defense of our natural lands in a pristine, untouched form. These pro-preservation thinkers believed in the protecting of American lands to not only ensure that future generations will get to experiences these lands, but to protect the heavily rooted early American nationalism in our natural expanses. Muir was one of the most outspoken supports of the preservation ideology, yet his stylistic writing style and rhetoric resulted in conservation being an adopted practice in the early 20th century Muir is often seen as one of the most pro-preservation
From the lone hiker on the Appalachian Trail to the environmental lobby groups in Washington D.C., nature evokes strong feelings in each and every one of us. We often struggle with and are ultimately shaped by our relationship with nature. The relationship we forge with nature reflects our fundamental beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. The works of timeless authors, including Henry David Thoreau and Annie Dillard, are centered around their relationship to nature.
Leopold defends his position the advent of a new ethical development, one that deals with humans’ relations to the land and its necessity. This relationship is defined as the land ethic, this concept holds to a central component referred to as the ecological consciousness. The ecological consciousness is not a vague ideal, but one that is not recognized in modern society. It reflects a certainty of individual responsibility for the health and preservation of the land upon which we live, and all of its components. If the health of the land is upheld, its capacity of self-renewal and regeneration is maintained as well. To date, conservation has been our sole effort to understand and preserve this capacity. Leopold holds that if the mainstream embraces his ideals of a land ethic and an ecological consciousness, the beauty, stability and integrity of our world will be preserved.
as I gaily walk down the shoreline of the Outer Banks. My all time favorite