The Centennial Return of Stewardship to the Ecological Society of America - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 162

Laboratory,” Leopold ( 1941 , p. 3) “set forth the need of wilderness as a base-datum
for problems of land-health.” Leopold, by then, had relocated from the Southwest to
the Midwest, founded the fi eld of wildlife management, and become a professor at
a land grant institution (the University of Wisconsin). In that capacity he was doing
“extension work” with farmers and other rural landowners in an effort to foster the
growing of wild “crops” of “game” for purposes of sport hunting. Leopold, to his
credit, did not betray his commitment to land use and disingenuously claim that he
and fellow members of the WS were no less interested in pure ecological study than
Shelford and fellow members of the ESA. Rather, land use, such as horticulture,
ranching, and, yes, manipulative wildlife management, needed a “base-datum”—a
control, land in the pink of health—against which to assess the success or failure of
various experimental techniques of land management. Leopold was, in effect, elab-
orating a point that Shelford ( 1933b , p. 535) himself had already adumbrated:
“There has been so much interference with natural processes in the form of 'control'
of this and that organism that the student of 'wild life' management”—that would
be Leopold—“who would seek a scientifi c basis for more scientifi c treatment of the
animals in his charge, is left without guiding principles or reliable information and
will continue thus until preservation measures . . . are put into effect in as many
nature reserves as possible.” Leopold's envisioned base-data wilderness areas would
map neatly on to the distinct types of natural areas that the Committee had listed. As
Leopold ( 1941 , p. 3) put it, “One cannot study the physiology of Montana in the
Amazon; each biotic province needs its own wilderness for comparative studies of
used and abused land.”
With this article, Leopold was addressing two audiences: members of the WS
and Victor Shelford. That he had Shelford personally in mind is suggested not only
by picking up Shelford's own suggestion that wildlife management needed a sound
scientifi c basis if it were to succeed in its control efforts, but by the heavy emphasis
that Leopold ( 1941 , p. 3) gives to Clementsian ecological organicism: “There are
two organisms in which the unconscious automatic processes of self-renewal have
been supplemented by conscious interference and control. One of these is man him-
self (medicine and public health). The other is land (agriculture and conservation).”
Leopold is not here shamelessly pandering to Shelford's theoretical commitments.
No, Leopold was beginning to lose confi dence in the essentially mechanistic “fac-
tors” approach that he had set out in Game Management , which was not working
out on the ground as he had theorized in the abstract (Flader 1974 , Meine 2010 ). He
was beginning to think that soil, plant, animal, and climate interactions were so
complex as to warrant portraying them as more like the interactions among the parts
of an organism than those among the parts of a machine. Leopold ( 1939 , p. 727)
recorded his own experience as a wildlife manager in “A Biotic View of Land,” an
address to the joint meeting of the ESA and the Society of American Foresters:
The emergence of ecology has placed the economic biologist in a peculiar dilemma: with
one hand he points out the accumulated fi ndings of his search for utility, or lack of utility,
in this or that species; with the other he lifts the veil from a biota so complex, so conditioned
by interwoven cooperations and competitions, that no man can say where utility begins or
ends.