Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
ous American ecologist and wildlife manager, Aldo Leopold (1886-1948), provides a
striking example in his topic
A Sand County Almanac.
Leopold is one of the fathers of the modern ecology movement, inspiring seminal
activists such as Rachel Carson, and yet he began his career as a staunch believer in the
reductionist approach, and was one of the founders of the science of wildlife manage-
ment. Leopold adhered to the unquestioning belief that humans are superior to the rest
of creation, and thought it morally justifiable to manipulate nature to maximise human
welfare. He supported a US government policy to eradicate the wolf from the United
States using scientific methods, the justification for this intervention being that wolves
competed with sport hunters for deer, so that fewer wolves would mean more deer for
the hunters.
Leopold held this view strongly for many years until one morning he was out with
some friends on a walk in the mountains of New Mexico. Being hunters, they carried
rifles with them in case they had an opportunity to kill some wolves. At lunchtime they
sat down at the edge of a cliff overlooking a turbulent river. Soon, they saw what ap-
peared to be a deer fording the torrent, but they quickly realised that it was one of a pack
of wolves. Leopold and his friends took up their rifles and began to shoot into the pack,
but with little accuracy. Eventually, an old wolf was hit, and Leopold rushed down the
steep slope in exhilaration. But what he found there was something utterly unexpected,
something strange and wild, something he'd never experienced before. What met him
ignited a part of his own soul that had been dormant until that moment; he saw a fierce
green fire dying in the old wolf's eyes. He writes that:
. . . there was something new to me in those eyes, something known only to her and to the mountain. I
thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunter's paradise. But
after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf, nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
Perhaps it is possible to understand the notion of a wolf disagreeing with such a view.
After all, the dying wolf was a fellow mammal with whom Leopold could feel a certain
affinity. But how could a lifeless, inert mountain possibly agree or disagree with any-
thing? What could Leopold have meant by that? What had he experienced at that pivotal
moment? Clearly he used the word 'mountain' as shorthand for the wild ecosystem in
which the incident took place, for the ecosystem as an entirety, as a living presence with
its deer, its wolves and other animals, its clouds, soils and streams. For the first time in
his life, Leopold felt completely at one with this wide ecological reality. He felt that it
had a power to communicate a sacred magnificence. He felt that it had its own life, its
own intelligence, its own history, its own trajectory into the future as a living person-
ality. He experienced the ecosystem as a great being, dignified and valuable in itself. It
must have been a moment of tremendous liberation and expansion of consciousness, of
