A Sand County Almanac at 50: Leopold in the New Century

Eric T. Freyfogle

The author is the Max L. Rowe Professor of Law, University of Illinois. Curt Meine was kind enough to comment promptly and thoughtfully on a draft of this Dialogue, which builds, not just on his good work, but on the particularly careful assessments of Leopold's late writings by J. Baird Callicott.

[30 ELR 10058]

In December 1935, in a hotel room in Nazi-governed Berlin, Aldo Leopold sat down to a desk and pulled out a sheet of hotel stationery. Turning the paper over, he scratched the word "Wilderness" across the top, and then proceeded to write 10 sentences in his tight cursive hand. Thoughts had come to him that day, and he wanted to get them on paper. The ideas were not new ones, at least not for him, but the phrasings that evening seemed clearer, more exact, and worth keeping.

Leopold's aim in writing was one that often moved him to put pencil to paper. He wanted to explain, in the plainest, simplest language, the conservation predicament of his time. How did human life fit into the planetary whole? Why did people abuse their natural homes? And what cultural shifts were needed before people would align themselves with nature's order?

In his first three sentences, Leopold considered the planet's living and nonliving parts:

The two great cultural advances of the past century were the Darwinian theory and the development of geology. The one explained how, and the other where, we live. Compared with such ideas, the whole gamut of mechanical and chemical invention pales into a mere matter of current ways and means.¹

Darwin showed where life came from, and how humans were related over time to other life forms. Geology explained the rest of the story, how the Rocky Mountains rose, how the Mississippi River set its course, and how Wisconsin got its rich soil.

In his next three sentences Leopold turned to the connections between and among these living and nonliving parts:

Just as important as the origin of plants, animals, and soil is the question of how they operate as a community. Darwin lacked time to unravel any more than the beginnings of an answer. That task has fallen to the new science of ecology, which is daily uncovering a web of interdependencies so intricate as to amaze—were he here—even Darwin himself, who, of all men, should have the least cause to tremble before the veil.²

Nature was not a collection of distinct pieces, randomly located and discretely led. It was an interrelated community of life, the land community, as he called it, or simply "the land." So complex and mysterious was this organic whole that Leopold needed metaphors to describe it: The land was akin to a living organism, he explained. It was like a complex machine. Yet these metaphors, Leopold knew, were not fully apt. They were rhetorical tools, useful when talking to people who knew about healthy and sick plants and to listeners who grasped the wisdom of saving parts when tinkering with tractors. Nature's constitutent elements interacted in unique, dynamic, and perplexing ways. The parts composed a whole much like the organs in a human body; like the instruments of a symphony; like the residents of a neighborhood.³

The land community that Leopold assessed, in his Berlin note and elsewhere, was a community that emphatically included humans. People arose from Darwinian evolution in the same manner as other life forms. They drew minerals from the same rocks, drank the same water, and breathed the same air. It made sense, then, to understand humans as community members, just like other organisms. It made sense, when studying life and talking about right and wrong living, to direct one's attention to the entirety of this diverse, pulsing, complex natural whole. And yet, as sensible as this holistic orientation was, it was not the orientation that then prevailed. Darwin notwithstanding, humans instinctively saw themselves as an entirely different type of life, and they routinely separated their bodies of knowledge into human and nonhuman realms.

Leopold turned to this problem of fragmentation in the sentences he wrote next:

[30 ELR 10059]

One of the anomalies of modern ecology is that it is the creation of two groups, each of which seems barely aware of the existence of the other. The one studies the human community almost as if it were a separate entity, and calls its findings sociology, economics, and history. The other studies the plant and animal community, [and] uniformly relegates the hodge-podge of politics to "the liberal arts."⁴

At this point, Leopold had reached the root of the matter. People saw themselves as separate from the rest of nature when in truth they were not. Humans did not form a distinct entity, one that could be studied and understood alone. They were embedded in nature as much as any living thing.

The overriding trouble, as Leopold knew, was that humankind was overstepping its bounds. It had shifted from using the land to abusing it. To the attentive observer, the signs of land sickness were all around: in the decline of good soils, in the disruption of hydrologic cycles, in the radical reorganization of biological communities, and in the shortening and deterioration of nutrient flows. Step by step, the land was losing its ability to sustain life.

What was the treatment for this sickness, Leopold asked? What would it take for humans to recognize that they, too, were parts of this community, and that they, too, depended on its healthy functioning? The answer, he decided on that December evening in Berlin, lay in a union of scholarly disciplines. It lay in a merger of perspectives on the human condition into one overarching, holistic perspective. Leopold expressed that goal, and displayed his cautious optimism as to its achievement, in the last of these 10 sentences:

The inevitable fusion of these two lines of thought will, perhaps, constitute the outstanding advance of the present century.⁵

Leopold did not underline the word "perhaps," but no doubt he emphasized it in his mind. He knew the kind of toiling and conflict that lay along the path toward fusion. Much of the needed work lay in the realm of public education. People needed to recognize, soberly and in detail, their connections to all other life. But the bigger challenge was to confront the deep-seated arrogance that pervaded Western culture—what David Ehrenfeld would later term the Arrogance of Humanism.⁶ Westerners believed that they stood apart from and above all other species, divided from the rest by their superior reason, knowledge, and tools. Among all life forms, they alone possessed moral value, or so they believed. They alone judged the world's beauty and worth. In the common view, good land use was a matter, not of wooing the land, but of dominating it to gratify human wants. Each land parcel was distinct, and economics provided the proper land use guide. This was an arrogance, Leopold well knew, rooted less in scientific knowledge or pseudo-knowledge than in emotion and myth. And for conservationists it was a potent obstacle indeed.

The errors of this arrogant approach, Leopold believed, could be seen everywhere. One needed to look no further than the typical farm field or working forest. "We of the machine age," he wrote before visiting Berlin,

admire ourselves for our mechanical ingenuity; we harness cars to the solar energy impounded in carboniferous forests; we fly in mechanical birds; we make the ether carry our words or even our pictures. But are these not in one sense mere parlor tricks compared with our utter ineptitude in keeping land fit to live upon? Our engineering has attained the pearly gates of a near-millennium, but our applied biology still lives in nomad's tents of the stone age.⁷

Land use practices were backward, and chiefly because social norms and values did not yet reflect the proper human role. "Land, to the average citizen," Leopold would write in one of the many important essays left unpublished at his death,

is still something to be tamed, rather than something to be understood, loved, and lived with. Resources are still regarded as separate entities, indeed, as commodities, rather than as our cohabitants in the land-community.⁸

A new concept of land was needed, one shaped by ecology, grounded in an inclusive community, and given force by senses of wonder, beauty, and love.

Though Leopold knew that world views changed slowly, he nonetheless hoped that the various fields of learning would coalesce by century's end. He termed their fusion "inevitable," not because the required work would be easy or quick, but because he could see no other way for humans to right their course. The day would come, he hoped, when history would blend with biology. Art would blend with physics. Commerce would blend with ethics. In time, he trusted, all disciplines would see the foundational value attached to the health of the biotic whole.

Leopold's Life and Work

Today, at the close of Leopold's "present century," it is useful to reconsider the life and work of the man whose ideas so powerfully shaped the conservation cause. A pioneering forester and wildlife manager, Aldo Leopold died fighting a brush fire in April 1948, at the age of 61.⁹ He left behind a slender book entitled A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There,¹⁰ published a year and a half after his death, exactly a half century ago. No book has had such influence on modern conservation thought. And as many critics see things, no book provides better guidance for the work that lies ahead.

Born in Burlington, Iowa, to German parents, Aldo Leopold became a skilled naturalist at an early age and developed a life-long love of all things wild. He spent his early years exploring, hunting, and fishing along the Mississippi [30 ELR 10060] River near his family's home. Upon graduation from Gifford Pinchot's new Yale Forest School, Leopold joined the U.S. Forest Service and was assigned to the Southwest. There, he learned to cruise timber, estimate game populations, and gauge the damages of insensitive grazing. In a young agency dominated by young men, he soon became a forest supervisor and then a regional inspector. Sensing the unique allure of big roadless areas, he joined with Forest Service colleagues to propose the creation of wilderness reserves—an idea that would quickly take root. Sensing the value of concerted game conservation, he pushed sportsmen to form associations to protect game populations.

By the 1920s Leopold was back in the Midwest, in central Wisconsin, where he emerged as a leading expert on wildlife issues. His path-breaking book, Game Management (1933), provided the first text for scientific wildlife studies in the United States. By 1934 he was ensconced at the University of Wisconsin as the nation's first professor of game management. By then, his focus on game management had broadened to include wildlife generally, and his conservation work addressed all of the problems afflicting midwestern farm landscapes, from soil erosion to excesses of deer. An avid writer from his youth, Leopold's reputation for thoughtfulness and good writing was spreading beyond the state, and his advice and services were widely sought. As a professor in a land grant university, Leopold tirelessly engaged in outreach programs, through radio broadcasts, newspaper columns, summer short-courses, and countless public talks. He aimed his work at what he deemed the central conservation challenge of his day; getting landowners to practice conservation on their private parcels, for the benefit of their communities and themselves. His days overwhelmed by students, visitors, and public demands, Leopold began rising early to find time for the penetrating, lyrical writing that was becoming his hallmark.

A major turn in Leopold's life came in 1935, when his family bought a run-down, 80-acre farm along the Wisconsin River near the town of Baraboo. There, Leopold the professor became Leopold the land doctor, as he and his family labored to restore fertility to an abused patch of soil. The family retreat was an old chicken coop, cleaned and modestly expanded to accommodate overnight stays. For more than a decade, the Leopold clan regularly visited their beloved "Shack" property, greeting its plants and animals, learning its seasons and moods, and sinking emotional roots. The Shack gave Leopold a chance to learn a tract of land more intimately than ever before. It gave him, too, a hands-on opportunity to see how difficult it was to integrate conservation measures in a real-life setting. At the Shack, Leopold the attentive naturalist religiously recorded his observations, and his journal continued to the morning of his death. But it was not just facts that he gathered on his endless rambles and during his spells of quietude. He was reaping aesthetic and spiritual harvests as well. He was gaining profound senses: of history's grand sweep; of the kinship of all life; and of the worth and beauty of the humblest sparrow.

Before long, Leopold's deepened understandings appeared in his writings. In 1937, he surprised the mostly professional readers of American Forests with a heart-felt meditation on the then-rare sandhill crane, for him the essential symbol of the Wisconsin River marshlands. The crane's splendor, he claimed in "Marshland Elegy,"¹¹ extended beyond the pretty to higher stages of beauty that were "as yet beyond the reach of words." "Our appreciation of the crane," he related,

grows with the slow unraveling of earthly history. His tribe, we now know, stems out of the remote Eocene. The other members of the fauna in which he originated are long since entombed within the hills. When we hear his call we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.

And so they live and have their being—these cranes—not in the constricted present, but in the wider reaches of evolutionary time.¹²

During his final two years, Leopold spent odd moments piecing together a collection of short, general-audience writings, some previously published and reworked, others newly written to fill perceived gaps. Initial inquiries to potential publishers produced no takers, and as his search continued he expanded and tinkered with the work. It was an odd gathering of nature sketches and conservation essays, unlike any other book, and editors had trouble making sense of it. A week before his death, he received the happy news that Oxford University Press would publish his manuscript, then entitled "Great Possessions." By the time the book came out, it had taken on a new title, one that linked the book more directly to the sandy soils of central Wisconsin that Leopold had come to love.

A modest seller at first, A Sand County Almanac reached vast audiences in the 1960s when paperback editions appeared. By the first Earth Day, the book had become the unofficial bible of the conservation cause, lauded as much for its poetry as for its wisdom. By the 1990s, with translations available in many languages, sales passed the two million mark. The book's 50th anniversary stimulated commemorative conferences and brought lengthy articles in major publications. Leopold's picture appeared on the front page of the Chicago Tribune¹³; in the New York Times, an editorial honored the book and its prescient author.¹⁴ Writing during the centenary of Leopold's birth—another occasion of widespread celebration—novelist Wallace Stegner would sum up the Almanac this way:

When this forming civilization assembles its Bible, its record of the physical and spiritual pilgrimage of the American people, the account of its stewardship in the Land of Canaan, A Sand County Almanac will belong in it, one of the prophetic books, the utterance of an American Isaiah.¹⁵

[30 ELR 10061]

Conserving Private Lands

Leopold's Almanac is best known for its ultimate essay, "The Land Ethic." In it, Leopold called for the expansion of human moral sensibilities to encompass all life forms, viewed collectively as the land. Humans should no longer perceive land simply as an economic commodity, Leopold argued; as something to use and discard at will. They should understand it as a community of life, a community that surrounded them and included them. Land use decisions ought to rest, not on economics alone, but on ethics and aesthetics as well. As members of the community, landowners owed duties to support the well-being of the landscapes that they helped form. They were ethically obliged to ensure that their actions sustained the organic whole. "A thing is right," Leopold summarized in the sentence of his "Land Ethic" that has become best know, "when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community."¹⁶ If landowners everywhere would embrace this community-focused ethic, if humans could see beauty and prosperity in a healthy land, then the conservation problem would largely end.

Leopold's land ethic, carefully crafted over the years, emerged out of a process of intellectual fusion much like the one he predicted in Berlin. The land as a whole could not flourish, he realized, through conservation measures performed solely on public lands. The conservation challenge was "coextensive with the map of the United States,"¹⁷ as he put it in 1933, and conservation measures were needed on all lands everywhere. Leopold saw plentiful evidence of poor land use in his early years in the Southwest. Much of the land there, he would later write, was on a "hair-trigger"¹⁸ ecologically, and restraint was needed for the land to remain healthy. Too often, southwestern lands were pushed beyond their limits, especially through unwise grazing. Overgrazing led to erosion, which in turn degraded waterways and worsened floods and droughts. Declines in native grasses and the invasion of unpalatable shrubs and trees in productive grasslands disrupted natural fire regimes. Wildlife populations were disturbed, in ways worsened by the extirpation of predators.

Professionally trained in Gifford Pinchot's shadow at Yale, Leopold the young forester embraced the sustained yield conservation ethic. Before long, Leopold recognized that Pinchot's ideals applied equally to private lands: they, too, could produce multiple benefits in perpetuity, including conservation benefits, when managed scientifically. Yet, as Leopold learned more about nature's complexity, he recognized how difficult it was to use land wisely. Trained experts might succeed in their researches, knowing only their narrow disciplines; a land manager, however, needed to know everything. "The plain lesson," he would write the year before his Berlin trip,

is that to be a practitioner of conservation on a piece of land takes more brains, and a wider range of sympathy, forethought, and experience, than to be a specialized forester, game manager, range manager, or erosion expert in a college or a conservation bureau. Integration is easy on paper, but a lot more important and more difficult in the field than any of us foresaw.¹⁹

Good land use required, not just the integration of scientific disciplines, but a healthy respect for human limits. Nature was highly complex, and even leading scientists could not predict its interactions or ascertain the functions of all its parts. Only an attentive, caring landowner stood much chance of drawing sustenance from land without degrading it. Science, to be sure, was learning more and more about land as a biological mechanism, but it was also producing ever more powerful tools to disrupt and reshape nature in unheralded ways. In his somber moments—moments that came more often as he aged—Leopold despaired that humans would ever gain the knowledge and ethical grounding required to live within nature's bounds. In a 1938 talk on the subject to the University of Wisconsin College of Engineering, Leopold extended both a condemnation and a challenge:

We end, I think, atwhat might be called the standard paradox of the twentieth century: our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides. But they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.²⁰

Particularly after acquiring his Shack and trying his own hand at land care, Leopold tended to reduce the conservation challenge to the individual level. The issue, condensed, was how to live on a land parcel without sapping its capacity for self-renewal. For the landscape as a whole to vibrate in health, each parcel needed good tending, and while variations among parcels were great—and hence the needed conservation work varied—the cultural problems that beset landowners were widely shared. Economics was a critical challenge everywhere: conservation, particularly on degraded lands, benefitted the community more than the landowner. Though Leopold did not speak in terms of "externalities," he clearly saw that land use practices, both good and bad, had ripple effects that spread wide.

Economics, however, was not the only obstacle to sound land use, nor was it, for Leopold, even the chief one. In the early 1930s, Leopold joined the conservation bandwagon that sought salvation in incentive programs that paid landowners to act right. Within a few years, though, the sobering results came trickling in. Incentive programs worked crudely and haphazardly, and old habits returned when money stopped. Incentive programs, much like land use laws, supplied a blunt tool. Enough money might convince a farmer to take an erosion-prone field out of production, but was not likely to change the farmer's mind and heart. Good land use required a devoted owner who was ecologically informed, adaptive in management methods, imbued with a communitarian ethic, and guided by visions of beauty and health. Economic incentives made good land use easier, but they could not, and in successive trials did not, lead owners to use land with care.

In retrospect and by focusing on the issue of wildlife, one can chart Leopold's growth on the critical issue of private lands conservation. When Leopold entered the field, wildlife [30 ELR 10062] management, such as it was, centered on artificial game propagation, the establishment of occasion refuges, and the enforcement of strict game laws. Once he gained his bearings, Leopold joined ranks with those who understood that wildlife was continuing to suffer largely due to the loss and degradation of habitat. The solution to that problem was to restore habitat, both through public lands acquisition and, more importantly, by getting landowners to produce game along with other crops. If lands were properly managed, nature would do the needed propagation. And if private lands supplied enough habitat, public lands need not expand.

By the early 1930s, however, Leopold realized that it was not land that needed managing so much as the landowners themselves. And as he pondered the enigma of land use motives, he saw that the chief impediments to better landowner behavior were the cultural values and ethics that then prevailed. In his extraordinary essay from 1947, "The Ecological Conscience," Leopold used case studies to explain the painfully slow progress. What studies showed, he announced, was "the futility of trying to improve the face of the land without improving ourselves."²¹ A cultural transformation was needed, one that reoriented the fundamental ways people perceived the world and their role in it. "Sometimes I think," he observed in "The Farmer as a Conservationist," a masterpiece penned while Europe slipped into war,

that ideas, like men, can become dictators. We Americans have so far escaped regimentation by our rulers, but have we escaped regimentation by our own ideas? I doubt if there exists today a more complete regimentation of the human mind than that accomplished by our self-imposed doctrine of ruthless utilitarianism. The saving grace of democracy is that we fastened this yoke on our own necks, and we can cast it off when we want to, without severing the neck. Conservation is perhaps one of the many squirmings which foreshadow this act of self-liberation.²²

A shift was needed, not just in individual values, but in widespread cultural values, so that social norms and public approbation might pull landowners in the right direction. What was needed, he wrote in 1933, was "a rebirth of that social dignity which ought to inhere in land-ownership." "Granted a community," he observed,

in which the combined beauty and utility of land determines the social status of its owner, and we will see a speedy dissolution of the economic obstacles which now best conservation. Economic laws may be permanent, but their impact reflects what people want, which in turn reflects what they know and what they are.²³

Leopold returned to this theme again and again, in writings and in lectures. A change of heart was needed. A change of aesthetic values was needed. "If the individual has a warm personal understanding of land," Leopold told undergraduate wildlife students in 1947,

he will perceive of his own accord that it is something more than a breadbasket. He will see land as a community of which he is only a member, albeit now the dominant one. He will see the beauty, as well as the utility, of the whole, and know the two cannot be separated. We love (and make intelligent use of) what we have learned to understand.²⁴

Leopold, though, was not content merely to offer encouragement to landowners. The community, he believed, ought to act forcefully to protect its interests and translate its ecological needs, fairly but firmly, into duties imposed on land-owning members. In "The Ecological Conscience," he lamented that conservation work "on the actual landscape of the back forty" was "still slipping two steps backward for each forward stride." "The usual answer" to this problem, he continued,

is "more conservation education." My answer is yes by all means, but are we sure that only the volume of educational effort needs stepping up? Is something lacking in its content as well? I think there is, and I here attempt to define it.

The basic defect is this: we have not asked the citizen to assume any real responsibility. We have told him that if he will vote right, obey the law, join some organizations, and practice what conservation is profitable on his own land, that everything will be lovely; the government will do the rest.

This formula is too easy to accomplish anything worthwhile. It calls for no effort or sacrifice; no change in our philosophy of values. . . .

No important change in human conduct is ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphases, our loyalties, our affections, and our convictions.²⁵

The Almanac

Leopold's struggle with the enigma of private lands conservation led him, late in life, to propose his now-familiar land ethic. He addressed his ethic to the individual reader, particularly the landowner, and hoped that his words would find fertile soil. So famous has his land ethic become, particularly his pithy call to promote the "integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community,"²⁶ that many readers have shortchanged the rest of the Almanac along with his many other writings. Though the land ethic distilled important elements of Leopold's thought, it was far from a full summation, and the land ethic itself, read in isolation, is easily misunderstood.

Leopold's success, as speaker and writer, had much to do with his willingness to tailor his words to his audience. Though skilled at formal logic, he knew that many readers responded best when he relied less on argument and more on illustration and story. So when he began his Almanac, he opened it, not with the a detailed analysis of land sickness, but with an invitation for readers to accompany him on a snowy January outing, to follow the tracks of a wandering skunk. The New Year was a time of beginnings and awakenings, for skunks and, Leopold silently hoped, for the average landowner, long asleep, like a hibernating animal, to the beauties and complexities all around.

The story of an oak, struck by lightening and sawed by Leopold and his wife, provided a chance to remind readers [30 ELR 10063] that humans were not the cause and center of all that took place. Migrating geese supplied a lesson on the natural unity of nations, and gave Leopold a chance to tweak readers preoccupied with economics: From the honking geese, he noted, "the whole continent receives as net profit a wild poem dropped from the murky skies upon the muds of March."²⁷ An old board, washed up by a flood, offered a lesson on attentiveness and history as well as a chance to challenge the means and ends of formal education: "The autobiography of an old board is a kind of literature not yet taught on campuses, but any riverbank farm is a library where he who hammers or saws may read at will."²⁸ Again and again, Leopold's stories highlighted the vastness of human ignorance: "It is fortunate, perhaps," he observes while watching a woodcock, "that no matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all of the salient facts about any one of them."²⁹ A brief meditation on Draba, "the smallest flower that blows," offered a lesson on the minor players in nature's unfolding drama: "Altogether," he relates dryly, "it is of no importance—just a small creature that does a small job quickly and well."³⁰ Again and again human folly takes center stage: "How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time!"³¹ Particularly sharp barbs were flung at disciples of the religion Progress: "The high priests of progress knew nothing of cranes, and cared less. What is a species more or less among engineers? What good is an undrained marsh anyhow?"³² And meditating on the dangers faced by wildlife, Leopold noted the similar plight of humans: "In farm country, the plover has only two real enemies: the gully and the drainage ditch. Perhaps we shall one day find that these are our enemies, too."³³

Artfully, seamlessly, Leopold wove throughout his masterwork his interconnected constellation of messages: about the need for an ecological view of the world and a sense of its interdependence; about the wisdom of embracing history and looking forward to future generations; about the need to integrate intuition and sentiment with empirically based facts; about the need, on the land, to fuse beauty and utility, ethics and economics; about the perils of an endless-growth philosophy; about the delights of careful nature study; and about how, in the end, nature itself was the most artful of painters, sculptors, and composers.

The Land Ethic and "Stability"

One problem that Leopold's land ethic faces in the present day is due to the ease with which it can be misunderstood. Leopold's classic summation refers to the "stability" of the land community, and readers versed in contemporary ecological thought can easily dismiss it as flawed. Nature, ecologists tell us, is in a state of constant flux.³⁴ It does not reach a climax state of existence and then remain there; it reaches a point of pause or disturbance, only to continue along an evolutionary path that, to human observers, seems aimless. Conservation policies based on a static view of nature, therefore, need revision to keep them sound.³⁵

Even casual readers of Leopold, however, are likely to know that Leopold himself did not embrace a static view of nature.³⁶ Indeed, even within his essay, "The Land Ethic," which so famously mentions stability, he digresses to correct [30 ELR 10064] the popular image of the "balance of nature."³⁷ Throughout his Almanac, and even more in other writings, Leopold noted nature's built-in dynamism. In an unpublished fragment, the beginnings of an essay tentatively entitled "Ecology, Philosophy, and Conservation," Leopold took note of two differing views of the land community, one that was most impressed by the competition among species, the other most impressed by the systems of cooperation.

It requires no very deep thought to perceive that these two ideas are not antagonistic. They are merely two spots where the fingers of two equally blind men touch a single elephant. The antagonism between them is the antagonism of opposing interpretations, both true. The truth inheres neither in the one nor in the other, but in the coexistence and interaction of both and perhaps other interpretations as yet unknown.³⁸

And in a thoughtful essay only recently published, Leopold cautioned readers against viewing all lands as fragile:

At this point I digress to refute the notion, unhappily cultivated by ecologists, that the land mechanism has a kind of Dresden china delicacy, and falls to pieces at a loud noise. The whole history of civilization shows land to be tough. Lands differ in their toughness, but even the most sensitive took several generations of violence to spoil. The pioneer has always striven for violent, not gentle, conversion to human use, and most of the technologies, especially agriculture and engineering, are still uninhibited in this respect.³⁹

Leopold knew that nature was dynamic and flexible, but he also knew that change occurs at differing rates and on differing scales and that lands varied in their abilities to withstand change. Human-induced changes caused as much damage as they did, not because they disrupted static balances, but because they altered conditions too swiftly, radically, and extensively. "Man's invention of tools," he noted in 1939, "has enabled him to make changes of unprecedented violence, rapidity, and scope."⁴⁰ In the case of many changes, the land might return to a state of healthy functioning, albeit at a lower level of productivity. But nature's ways were often mysterious, and one sometimes never knew the importance of a species or process until it was disturbed. "The combined evidence of history and ecology," wrote Leopold in 1939, "seems to support one general deduction: the less violent the man-made changes, the greater the probability of successful readjustment in the [biotic] pyramid."⁴¹

When Leopold referred to the desirability of promoting land "stability," he used the term, not as a reference to a static or balanced natural condition, but as a short-hand reference to the overall health of the land. To preserve stability was merely to preserve the land's health—its capacity to perpetuate itself. Indeed, in several key essays Leopold used the terms as synonyms.⁴²

To understand Leopold's land ethic, then—indeed, to understand the final decade of Leopold's thought and work—it is essential to grasp what was for him the foundational idea of land health. Only occasionally did Leopold refer to his "land ethic," although the underlying ideas, to be sure, were his regular intellectual companions. In contrast, he talked often and at length about land health. By 1941 at the latest, land health served as the polestar for all that he did. Indeed, his land ethic was less an independent end than a means to help achieve a broader, more inclusive end: the health of the entire community of life.

Land Health

What, then, did Leopold mean by land health?

"Land-health," Leopold wrote in 1944, "is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land."⁴³ "Health expresses the cooperation of the interdependent parts: soil, water, plants, animals, and people. It implies collective self-renewal and collective self-maintenance."⁴⁴ Health, of course, was a characteristic commonly associated with a single organism. Leopold used the term in much the same way and with the same good connotations, but without asserting that land operated as tightly and coherently as an organism. Whenever he spoke of land health, he chose his words with care:

The land consists of soil, water, plants, and animals, but health is more than a sufficiency of these components. It is a state of vigorous self-renewal in each of them, and in all collectively. Such a collective functioning of interdependent parts for the maintenance of the whole is characteristic of an organism. In this sense land is an organism, and conservation deals with its functional integrity, or health.⁴⁵

[30 ELR 10065]

Like human health for physicians today, land health for Leopold the land doctor was easiest to explain by identifying symptoms of disease, and Leopold did so in many writings. A concise list appeared at the beginning of one of his most important essays on the subject, "The Land-Health Concept and Conservation":

The symptoms of disorganization, or land sickness, are well known. They include abnormal erosion, abnormal intensity of floods, decline of yields in crops and forests, decline of carrying capacity in pastures and ranges, outbreak of some species as pests and the disappearance of others without visible cause, a general tendency toward the shortening of species lists and of food chains, and a world-wide dominance of plant and animal weeds. With hardly a single exception, these phenomena of disorganization are only superficially understood.⁴⁶

Leopold's understanding of land health was shaped by his early days in the Southwest, where overgrazing and other misdeeds caused visible erosion, waterway degradation, and declines in the productivity of native grasslands. Once in Wisconsin, he remained painfully aware of soil issues, both erosion and declines in tilth and fertility, so much so that whenever he wrote about land sickness he always began with soil. Hydrologic modification typically appeared second on his list of symptoms, whether the visible evidence took the form of unnatural floods, droughts, or declining water tables. Other issues followed in line: disruptions of species lists and food webs, the emergence of particular species as pests, declines in the quantity and quality of the land's yield, and others.

In another essay that displayed his intellectual progress, Leopold illustrated land sickness by citing the problems that remained, in two specific settings, despite the best efforts of conservationists. One example came from southwestern Wisconsin, an area where federal conservation bureaus had worked for years. Though their various efforts had achieved successes, full health remained illusive:

This region still displays flashy streams, loss of topsoil, silting of reservoirs, migration of plowland from upland to marshes and flood-channels, irruption of white grubs and weed pests, exaggerated drouth damage, falling water table[s], and scarcity of upland game.⁴⁷

His other example came from a place he also knew well, the Southwest. There, control measures had largely come too late, "after erosion due to early overgrazing had gained momentum." Leopold wrote:

The result: silted reservoirs, tearing out of valleys, widespread drainage of already dry soils by gullies, wholesale conversion of grass to chaparral, wholesale replacement of palatable by unpalatable range plants, irruption of rodent pests, loss of vulnerable and predacious wild species, falling water tables, dust storms.⁴⁸

Leopold also focused on the land's ability to recycle nutrients efficiently and endlessly.⁴⁹ Only if this happened, would the soil—"the repository of food between its successive trips through the chains"—retain its fertility and produce abundant, nutritious yields. Land was healthy "when its food chains are so organized as to be able to circulate the same food an indefinite number of times."⁵⁰

Land sickness, Leopold knew, was not a fatal ailment. The land would not fully succumb and no longer sustain life. The outcome was less dire but nonetheless disturbing, and in the long run, just as unacceptable. He addressed the issue toward the end of his essay "The Land Ethic":

This almost world-wide display of disorganization in the land seems to be similar to disease in an animal, except that it never culminates in complete disorganization or death. The land recovers, but at some reduced level of complexity, and with a reduced carrying capacity for people, plants, and animals.⁵¹

If these, then, were the signs of land sickness, what steps were needed to bring the land back to health? On this point, Leopold's confidence flagged, for he knew that even experts possessed but partial answers. To give confident answers one had to distinguish cause from effect, trace the links betweenand among symptoms, and determine how and to what extent symptoms were responses to human action." As a matter of fact," he wrote in 1944, "the land mechanism is too complex to be understood, and probably always will be. We are forced to make the best guess we can from circumstantial evidence."⁵² "The best we can do" by way of understanding and promoting land health, he wrote in 1942, "is to recognize and cultivate the general conditions which seem to be conducive to it."⁵³ Yet Leopold did not accept ignorance as an excuse for inaction, particularly by experts, for conservation problems were grave and urgent action needed. In a 1946 essay left in pencil draft at his death, he issued a plea for his fellow ecologists to join him in offering their "best guesses" as to what it took for the land to regain health. Their knowledge was plainly imperfect, but they knew more than untrained observers, and their best guesses were "likely to contribute something to social wisdom which would otherwise be lacking."⁵⁴

In the case of many of the symptoms, the desired aim was easy to see, even if implementing measures posed challenges. Soil needed to remain in place, which required changes in tillage practices, grazing patterns, and crop rotations. To restore more natural water flows, drainage lines and tiles needed removal, with more land returned to protective cover. Pests required controlling, particularly aggressive exotics, and efforts were needed to make working lands more hospitable for absent and under-represented native species. Leopold also urged greater gentleness in the pace and scope of human land changes. Land conversion was an inevitable force, but "the less violent these conversions, the more likely they are to be durable, and the less likely they are to exhibit unforeseen repercussions."⁵⁵ As Leopold looked around from his vantage in central Wisconsin, obvious violence was taking place in waterways and, increasingly, in chemically based resource-production efforts.

[30 ELR 10066]

A veritable epidemic of violence prevails at the present moment in the field of water management. Flood-control dams, hydro electric dams, channelization and dyking of rivers, watershed authorities, drainages, lake outlet controls, and impoundments are running riot, all in the name of development and conservation.⁵⁶

In resource production, violent tendencies were illustrated by "the reckless use of new poisons in agronomy, horticulture, wildlife control, fish management, forestry, and soil fumigation."⁵⁷

As he thought about land health, Leopold was perplexed most by the matter of preserving native species. To what extent were native species needed to sustain the land's health, and in what numbers were they needed? No living person could answer that question, Leopold believed, and he doubted an answer would soon emerge. A full complement of native species was apparently needed to keep a place functioning, but did that mean every species? Probably not, Leopold guessed. But who was to decide which species were dispensable? Who knew which species held keystone positions in an ecosystem so that their removal or disappearance might cause decline?

Leopold's thoughts about this issue progressed along two lines, even as he and his students actively studied the systemic roles of particular species. One line of thought centered on the roles of species in keeping food webs intact and returning nutrients to the soil. The land's functioning was threatened by the shortening and simplification of food webs. Its health, accordingly, required "not only characteristic kinds, but also characteristic numbers of each species in the food chains."⁵⁸ Leopold's other line of thought centered on community functioning in general and on the vast human ignorance about how land worked. For Leopold, these intertwined lines of thought justified the retention of as many native species as possible—not because they were all clearly essential, but because errors could be costly. "As far as we know," he observed cautiously in 1942, "the state of health depends on the retention in each part of the full gamut of species and materials comprising its evolutionary equipment."⁵⁹ "No species can be 'rated' without the tongue in the cheek," he observed three years before:

The old categories of "useful" and "harmful" have validity only as conditioned by time, place, and circumstance. The only sure conclusion is that the biota as a whole is useful, and biota includes not only plants and animals, but soils and waters as well.⁶⁰

"We must assume, therefore," he added in his important 1946 essay,

that some causal connection exists between the integrity of the native communities and their ability for self-renewal. To assume otherwise is to assume that we understand the biotic mechanisms. The absurdity of such an assumption hardly needs comment, especially to ecologists.⁶¹

One of Leopold's most concise statements of the human-land predicament was set forth in an undated note written late in his life:

My belief that diverse landscapes tend to be stable is without proof. It is an "act of faith" with only a historical correlation behind it. But the converse theorem, that over-tinkered landscapes are unstable, is written large in recent history. Worldwide commerce has brought a worldwide pooling of floras and faunas, partly by deliberate importation, partly by accidental dispersion as "stowaways." The biotic cocktail has been shaking at the same time that the axe of progress came down on the native food chains. The two cannot be dissociated as causes, but their joint effects are clear; many species have melted away, while others have got out of bounds as pests and diseases. The biota has not only run down its storage battery, the soil, but its working parts are flying about the shop at random.⁶²

Yet as Leopold thought about other life forms and the reasons for preservation, he was not constrained by utility. He was equally concerned about the land's beauty, it music, its inherent worth, and the simple joys that nature so abundantly supplied. In a brief piece, written in 1941 but only recently published, Leopold in his typical, condensed way expressed the overall goals of wildlife planning. "The reasons for restoring wildlife," he wrote, are two:

1. It adds to the satisfactions of living.

2. Wild plants and animals are parts of the land-mechanism, and cannot safely be dispensed with.⁶³

Leopold's order here was intentional and well-considered. Land health, the well-being of "the land-mechanism," drew second billing. The main reason for preserving wildlife, at least for this audience, was more aesthetic and heartfelt.

The Inevitable Fusion?

In a talk to the seventh North American Wildlife Conference in 1942, Leopold returned to the need for a fusion of academic perspectives, this time tying the idea in with the goal of land health that had emerged so forcefully since his trip to Berlin:

Who is the land? We are, but no less the meanest flower that blows. Land ecology discards at the outset the fallacious notion that the wild community is one thing, the human community another.

What are the sciences? Only categories for thinking. Sciences can be taught separately, but they can't be used separately, either for seeing land or doing anything with it. It was a surprise to me to find this was "news" to many well-trained but highly specialized graduate students.

What is art? Only the drama of the land's workings.

With such a synthesis as a starting point, the tenets of conservation formulate themselves almost before the teacher can suggest them. Basic to all conservation is the concept of land-health; the sustained self-renewal of the community.⁶⁴

Disciplinary boundaries made sense to people who worked indoors, and to people whose outdoor work never strayed [30 ELR 10067] beyond data collection and analysis. To the working landowner, everything came together—everything had to come together—and the limits on human knowledge were palpable. Leopold brought home this pragmatic message in his delightful sketch, "Axe-in-Hand," included in his Almanac. With shovel and axe at his disposal, Leopold related, an owner of land necessarily took on "the divine functions of creating and destroying plants." "I have read many definitions of what is a conservationist," Leopold confessed,

and written not a few myself, but I suspect that the best one is written not with a pen, but with an axe. It is a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land.⁶⁵

Axe in hand, needing to act, a landowner could not resort to a single discipline for advice, nor could he separate science from ethics or beauty from economics. When the axe fell, a decision was made. Good decisions arose, not from a specialized mind, but from a mind shaped by wisdom, tempered by humility, and guided by aesthetic as well as economic ideals.

Lookingback on Leopold's Berlin note, written at a time when human history was taking a particularly dark turn, it is clear that Leopold's vision was too optimistic. The fusion of disciplines that he deemed inevitable within his century has not come about, and indeed is only marginally closer to achievement. Disciplines have fragmented into subdisciplines, and the highest honors in many biological fields go to people whose work rarely if ever takes them outdoors. Mathematical models are worshiped by people who know little about land. For too many researchers, ethics has become merely a process to work through en route to the forgone conclusion that economics alone will reign. Aesthetics are viewed as subjective, incidental, and unimportant. Conservation organizations are hardly less fragmented in their labors, or less confused in their rhetoric, than when Leopold bemoaned the chaos of his day. In law, too much scholarship seems aimless and fractured, particularly since the arrival of libertarian and free-market advocates whose work is driven by motives that Leopold would doubtless have decried.⁶⁶ Too few scholars have learned to temper science with a due regard for human ignorance—a process that many working landowners manage with ease—and, lacking that ability, have become disoriented by the latest "news" of nature's dynamism.

If Leopold were alive today, he would be saddened by the slow progress toward his necessary fusion. He would be saddened, too, that so few conservationists (much less others) center their thoughts and hopes on the land community as a whole. The sobering truth is that the conservation movement still has no overall goal, no focusing message that explains what they are about and where they are heading.⁶⁷ Were Leopold alive, he would doubtless comment that "land health" is simply one of many phrases that conservationists might employ. He would be troubled, not because his favored phrase has failed to catch on, but because the underlying ideas largely have not, at least in public discourse. In the more particular context of the land ethic, Leopold's despair would deepen when he surveyed modern agriculture, where so many agribusiness industries and industrial-farm groups have become ardent opponents of environmental progress. Leopold rested his land ethic on the conviction that landowners were community members and as such were obliged to sustain the common good. He proposed raising the bar of citizenship so that good land use became a minimum expectation. In recent years, pushed on by agribusiness, the communal duties of rural landowners have seemingly reached a nadir. Too many landowners demand payment for any and all conservation measures. Irresponsibility plagues the day.

And yet, if legal citations are any guide, Leopold's star has never shone brighter as the new century opens. A Westlaw search covering the five-year period beginning in 1994 turned up 260 texts and periodical articles citing Leopold's work, a sharp increase from prior periods. Leopold, little interested (apparently) in law, has become one of the most cited authors in environmental law. A new emphasis on moral standards and responsibility is in the air, and the conservation community now recognizes the importance of conserving places where people live and work. A handful of states are attending finally to the problems of nonpoint source water pollution, and efforts are underway here and there to consider wildlife-habitat needs at the landscape level. And if ecosystem management is sometimes more slogan than actuality, it nonetheless reflects a yearning for integrated visions that Leopold would have endorsed.

Given the flaws in Leopold's predication that fusion would soon come, one is hesitant to set deadlines, even with a full century lying ahead. The fusion he predicted has yet to occur, just as land health has yet to rise as the conservation polestar. What can be claimed, and claimed with confidence, is that the new century will have as much need for Leopold as did the last. Our need for his ethic has not lessened in the past half century, nor has ensuing research done more than supply tools to clarify his language and implement his dreams. Indeed, in few ways have we moved beyond the problems that occupied his days. In few ways, have we advanced beyond his understandings. Our libraries of data are more vast, but Leopold's peculiar talent lay less in his detailed knowledge than in his unmatched ability to integrate, to bring together, to nourish and heal, to imagine that long-term path toward fusion. As a people skilled in the opposite, in tearing down, fragmenting, discarding, degrading, and criticizing, we need Leopold as much as ever.

In a book review in 1940, commenting on a report on wildlife issued by a special U.S. Senate Committee (Senate Report 1203), Leopold noted sympathetically and metaphorically the confused energy that then characterized his profession:

Like a new gusher, a pressure of creative energy in the substrata of a newly tapped intellectual field is emitting a [30 ELR 10068] stream of facts faster than the surface crew can handle them. There are shoutings and confusions and hasty attempts to connect tanks and pipelines.⁶⁸

Order was needed, he knew, but too much could be as bad as too little:

When some methodical scholar in the year 2000 writes the history of conservation in America, his first chapter will draw heavily on Senate Report 1203. Perhaps conservation by that time will be a card-indexed affair, but perhaps it will lack the hurly-burly vigor of a youthful idea.⁶⁹

With the advent of computers conservation has not become a "card-indexed affair," at least in literal terms. Whether it retains its "hurly-burly vigor," as Leopold hoped, is less clear. In any event, like any reform movement conservation needs to replenish, again and again, its inventory of vigor and youthfulness.

And there is no better source for replenishment than The Professor himself.

1. The original pencil draft of this essay is found in the Leopold papers at the University of Wisconsin Archives, Madison, Wisconsin. It is published in full in CURT MEINE, ALDO LEOPOLD: HIS LIFE AND WORK 359-60 (1988).

2. Id.

3. Leopold's use of metaphors when addressing the public stemmed from his recognition that public audiences in general had low tolerances for detailed science. He considered the problem in an obituary he wrote on his friend, P.S. Lovejoy. To the "mass mind," too much reason "induced pain followed by defense reactions." "Agricultural extension," he noted,

has developed techniques which recognize the limits of public tolerance; it administers small doses of "science" heavily diluted with economic and social persuasions. Conservation must do the same.

Aldo Leopold, Obituary: P.S. Lovejoy, J. WILDLIFE MGMT., Jan. 1943, at 125.

Leopold used a variety of metaphors to explain basic ecological principles, and was quick to compliment other writers who developed their own effective ones. He offered the following compliment to the authors of a 1940 history of conservation, written apparently for high school students:

To convey the theme of interdependence (i.e. ecology) the authors employ a figure of speech: the neighborhood. What better! To convey the theme of momentum in retrogression, "each mistake (in land use) becomes a snowball, which gains in size as it rolls downhill." The book is full of such graphic similes, many of them original and most of them accurate.

Aldo Leopold, Review of This Land Is Our Land: the Story of Conservation in the United States, J. FORESTRY, Jan. 1941, at 72.

4. MEINE, supra note 1, at 359-60.

5. Id.

6. DAVID EHRENFELD, THE ARROGANCE OF HUMANISM (1981) (a much-reprinted classic of contemporary conservation thought, by the founding editor of Conservation Biology).

7. The Conservation Ethic [hereinafter Conservation Ethic], in THE RIVER OF THE MOTHER OF GOD AND OTHER ESSAYS BY ALDO LEOPOLD 184 (Susan L. Flader & J. Baird Callicott eds., 1991) [hereinafter RMG] (essay originally published in 1933).

8. Conservation: In Whole or in Part [hereinafter Conservation: In Whole], in RMG, supra note 7, at 311 (originally written in 1944; first published in 1991).

9. The facts of Leopold's life are all drawn from MEINE, supra note 1. I am also indebted in my understanding of Leopold's career and the evolution of his thought—as are all other Leopold scholars—to Susan L. Flader's pioneering work, THINKING LIKE A MOUNTAIN: ALDO LEOPOLD AND THE EVOLUTION OF AN ECOLOGICAL AITITUDE TOWARD DEER, WOLVES, AND FORESTS (1974), and to her invaluable work in organizing and indexing the Leopold archives.

10. ALDO LEOPOLD, A SAND COUNTY ALMANAC AND SKETCHES HERE AND THERE (1949) [hereinafter ALMANAC].

11. AMERICAN FORESTS, Oct. 1937, at 472-74. This essay was reprinted in the ALMANAC.

12. Id.

13. Janet Ginsburg, He Saw the Forest and the Trees, CHI. TRIB., Nov. 3, 1999, at B1, 6-7.

14. Editorial, "A Sand County Almanac" at 50, N.Y. TIMES, Nov. 13, 1999, at A26 ("Leopold will last not because he captured a moment or a feeling, though he does both in the first sections of 'A Sand County Almanac.' He will last because we have scarcely begun to work out the implications of his ideas.").

15. Wallace Stegner, The Legacy of Aldo Leopold, in COMPANION TO A SAND COUNTY ALMANAC 233 (J. Baird Callicott ed., 1987).

16. ALMANAC, supra note 10, at 224-25.

17. Conservation Ethic, supra note 7, at 187 (emphasis in original).

18. Id. at 184.

19. Conservation Economics, in RMG, supra note 7, at 197 (originally published in 1934).

20. Engineering and Conservation, in RMG, supra note 7, at 254 (ong-inally written in 1938; first published in 1991).

21. The Ecological Conscience, in RMG, supra note 7, at 340 (originally published in 1947).

22. The Farmer as a Conservationist, in RMG, supra note 7, at 259 (originally published in 1939).

23. Conservation Ethic, supra note 7, at 191.

24. Wherefore Wildlife Ecology?, in RMG, supra note 7, at 337 (originally written circa 1947; first published in 1991).

25. The Ecological Conscience, supra note 21, at 338.

26. ALMANAC, supra note 10, at 224-25.

27. Id. at 23.

28. Id. at 25.

29. Id. at 32-33.

30. Id. at 26.

31. Id. at 39.

32. Id. at 100.

33. Id. at 35.

34. Current ecological ideas are thoughtfully assessed, and linked to broader intellectual trends, in Donald Worster's essay, The Ecology of Order and Chaos, in THE WEALTH OF NATURE: ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY AND THE ECOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 156-70 (1993). The popular study of the "new ecology" by DANIEL B. BOTKIN, DISCORDANT HARMONIES: A NEW ECOLOGY FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY (1990), is usefully read in conjunction with DONALD WORSTER, NATURE'S ECONOMY: A HISTORY OF ECOLOGICAL IDEAS (2d ed. 1994), and Michael G. Barbour, Ecological Fragmentation in the Fifties, in UNCOMMON GROUND: TOWARD REINVENTING NATURE 233-55 (William Cronon ed., 1995), which explore in depth the variations in ecological thought over the past half century and which, on balance, discredit in material ways Botkin's exaggerated and self-promoting history of shifts within ecology.

35. A common tale now passing through environmental law literature is that the principal federal environmental statutes were originally based on the science of ecology, and that lawmakers were motivated in particular by a "balance of nature" ecological view. The thesis apparently first entered the literature in A. Dan Tarlock, The Nonequilibrium Paradigm in Ecology and the Partial Unraveling of Environmental Law, 27 LOY. L.A. L. REV. 1121 (1994); subsequent recitations of the thesis largely trace back to this article. Tarlock, however, offered little support for his claim, other than citing, without discussion or explanation, several federal environment statutes. He mentioned no particular provisions of these laws, nor did he cite any substantive provision that was included in a statute, or drafted as it was, because lawmakers embraced a "balance of nature" view as opposed to some other view. Tarlock's claim, repeated without further support, served as the basis of Jonathan Baert Wiener's review essay, Law and the New Ecology: Evolution, Categories, and Consequences, 22 ECOLOGY L.Q. 325 (1995). It also formed the basis of a symposium at Duke University, Symposium: Beyond the Balance of Nature: Environmental Law Faces the New Ecology, 7 DUKE ENVTL. L. & POL'Y F. 1 (1996), which, if the published proceedings are an accurate guide, also spent little time considering the validity of Tarlock's claim. Tarlock's work relied heavily upon a 1990 book by Daniel Botkin, supra note 34. That book, however, was far less pathbreaking than legal scholars seem to realize, and it achieved much of its pathbreaking reputation by misdescribing the history of ecological thought.

My own view is that federal statutes, particularly as implemented today, are grounded hardly at all in any ecological vision, old or new. Eric T. Freyfogle, BOUNDED PEOPLE, BOUNDLESS LANDS: ENVISIONING A NEW LAND ETHIC 39-48 (1998); The Ethical Strands of Environmental Law, 1994 U. ILL. L. REV. 819. Indeed, they are characterized chiefly by the kind of intellectual incoherence that typically emerges out of the lawmaking arena. Their main concern lies with the direct impacts of pollutants on human health. The various arguments for wilderness preservation that Congress heard were only modestly based on ecology. The Endangered Species Act (ESA), 16 U.S.C. §§ 1531-1544, ELR STAT. ESA §§ 2-18, rests less (if at all) on ecology than on a moral claim for species preservation (a claim embraced by the vast majority of Americans), on aesthetic considerations, and on the "cure for cancer" possibilities allegedly latent within various species. I wish it were the case, as Professor Tarlock asserts, that Leopold's land ethic provided "the ur-text" for the modern environmental regulatory regime, A. Dan Tarlock, Environmental Law: Ethics or Science?, 7 DUKE ENVTL. L. & POL'Y F. 193, 197 (1996), but my sense is that nearly the opposite is true: Leopold's ethic has inspired conservationists to act, but has had little if any discernible impact in the legal arena.

36. Leopold's land ethic is thoughtfully reassessed in light of recent ecological thought in J. Baird Callicott, Do Deconstructive Ecology and Sociobiology Undermine the Leopold Land Ethic?, in BEYOND THE LAND ETHIC: MORE ESSAYS IN ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY 117-39 (1999).

37. ALMANAC, supra note 10, at 214. Leopold addresses the issue in more detail in A Biotic View of Land [hereinafter Biotic View], in RMG, supra note 7, at 267 (originally published in 1939).

38. Ecology, Philosophy, and Conservation, in UNFINISHED MANUSCRIFTS (Leopold Archives, University of Wisconsin, Madison).

39. Biotic Land-Use [hereinafter Biotic Land-Use], in ALDO LEOPOLD, FOR THE HEALTH OF THE LAND: UNPUBLISHED ESSAYS AND OTHER WRITINGS 207 (J. Baird Callicott & Eric T. Freyfogle eds., 1999) [hereinafter FOR THE HEALTH OF THE LAND] (originally written circa 1942; first published 1999).

40. Biotic View, supra note 37, at 269.

41. Id. at 270.

42. E.g., Biotic Land-Use, supra note 39, at 202 ("stabilization or land-health"); Conservation: In Whole, supra note 8, at 311 ("land was stable, i.e., it retained its health"), 312 ("Stability or health"); Planning for Wildlife [hereinafter Planning for Wildlife], in FOR THE HEALTH OF THE LAND, supra note 39, at 194 ("stable (i.e., healthy) land") (originally written in 1941; first published in 1999).

These three essays, particularly the first two, are among Leopold's most important explorations of land health. Also important are his Wilderness as a Land Laboratory, in RMG, supra note 7, at 287 (originally published 1941; later incorporated in the "Wilderness for Science" section in his essay Wilderness in the ALMANAC, supra note 10, at 194-98); The Land-Health Concept and Conservation [hereinafter Land-Health Concept], in FOR THE HEALTH OF THE LAND, supra note 39, at 218 (originally written 1946; first published 1999); and various passages within his essay The Land Ethic, in the ALMANAC, especially pages 214-23. Leopold's first use of the term "health" with respect to land may have come in 1939 in his The Farmer as a Conservationist, supra note 22, at 264. Leopold considers land health more briefly, and puts it to use in various conservation settings, in the following essays, listed chronologically: Land-Use and Democracy, in RMG, supra note 7, at 295 (originally published 1942); The Role of Wildlife in a Liberal Education, in RMG, supra note 7, at 301 (originally published 1942); The Outlook for Farm Wildlife, in FOR THE HEALTH OF THE LAND, supra note 39, at 213 (originally published 1945); The Ecological Conscience, supra note 21 (originally published 1947).

43. Conservation: In Whole, supra note 8, at 318. Leopold's idea of land health is explored most thoroughly, in the context of both Leopold's thought and today, in the essays contained in Part VI of J. BAIRD CALLICOTT, BEYOND THE LAND ETHIC: MORE ESSAYS IN ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY (1999).

44. Land-Use and Democracy, supra note 42, at 300.

45. Conservation: In Whole, supra note 8, at 310.

46. Land-Health Concept, supra note 42, at 219.

47. Biotic Land-Use, supra note 39, at 201.

48. Id. at 202.

49. Leopold considered the nutrient cycle most lyrically in his essay Odyssey, which appeared in his ALMANAC, supra note 10, at 104-08, and in his essay The Round River, in ROUND RIVER: FROM THE JOURNALS OF ALDO LEOPOLD 158-65 (Luna B. Leopold ed., 1953).

50. Biotic Land-Use, supra note 39, at 205.

51. ALMANAC, supra note 10, at 219.

52. Conservation: In Whole, supra note 8, at 315.

53. Biotic Land-Use, supra note 39, at 203.

54. Land-Health Concept, supra note 42, at 220.

55. Id. at 223.

56. Id.

57. Id.

58. Biotic Land-Use, supra note 39, at 205.

59. Land-Use and Democracy, supra note 42, at 300.

60. Biotic View, supra note 37, at 267.

61. Land-Health Concept, supra note 42, at 221.

62. Undated fragment, Leopold Archives, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

63. Planning for Wildlife, supra note 42, at 193-94.

64. The Role of Wildlife in a Liberal Education, supra note 42, at 303

65. ALMANAC, supra note 10, at 67-68.

66. I attempt to situate these scholars in the landscape of environmental law writing in Five Paths of Environmental Scholarship, 1999 U. ILL. L. REV. (forthcoming 2000).

67. I assess this situation, and offer a revised version of land health as an organizing concept, in BOUNDED PEOPLE, BOUNDLESS LANDS: ENVISIONING A NEW LAND ETHIC, supra note 35, ch. 3. I also put land health to use in Consumption and the Practice of Land Health, in THE BUSINESS OF CONSUMPTION: ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 181 (Laura Westra & Patricia Werhane eds., 1998), and, in a more legal context, Repairing the Waters of the National Parks, 74 DENV. U. L. REV. 815 (1997).

68. Aldo Leopold, Review of The Status of Wildlife in the United States, J. FORESTRY, Oct. 1940, at 823.

69. Id.