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Just over a century ago, on July 18, 1909, a fresh-faced young forester, the ink barely dry on his Yale diploma, arrived in Springerville, Arizona. Aldo Leopold, who would become one of the great forces in the American environmental movement, was reporting for duty at the headquarters of the Apache National Forest. By the end of his career, and particularly in the years after his death in 1948, Leopold would cause people around the world to realize that they are an integral part of—rather than separate from—nature.

I spent four years working in the Apache-Sitgreaves and Gila National Forests, where Leopold first had inklings of the ideas that would develop over the next 30-odd years. In an essay written shortly before his death, “The Land Ethic,” he presented a philosophy in which man is part of the fabric of nature, entitled to use but not abuse the world around him. It articulated the risks of imagining ourselves outside the realm of the natural world and offered a way of thinking to help us remember that, however influential our role, mankind is only one of an entire cast of characters in Earth's ecological drama.

His work affected me deeply as a young biologist and lover of nature, but it wasn't until I re-read his A Sand County Almanac, while living in Arizona, that the full impact of his ideas became clear to me. I was working for the Mexican Wolf Reintroduction Project at the time, monitoring the handful of wolves that had been released into the area after generations in captivity. Sitting on a canyon wall overlooking the Black River with a worn copy of the book, I savored the words I almost knew by heart:

We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white-water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings...

In those days, we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf...When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes–something known only to her and the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; 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.
— From A Sand County Almanac, “Thinking Like a Mountain”

It was one of the great turning points in American literature, and it points to one of the most valuable lessons we can learn from Aldo Leopold. When an experience or some new information makes you realize that your firmly held beliefs are wrong, don't be afraid to own up to your change of heart. Leopold had several such revelations over the course of his career.

I also learned from his writing that an appreciation of nature's beauty does not disqualify one from also being a student of her more technical aspects. No one was a more analytical observer of nature than Leopold, yet there are times in his writing when he can't contain himself. Reflecting on the area just south of his headquarters in Springerville, he wrote:

The top of the mountain was a great meadow, half a day's ride across, but do not picture it as a single amphitheater of grass, hedged in by a wall of pines. The edges of that meadow were scrolled, curled and crenulated with an infinity of bays and coves, points and stringers, peninsulas and parks, each one of which differed from all the rest. No man knew them all, and every day's ride offered a gambler's chance of finding a new one. I say 'new' because one often had the feeling, riding into some flower-spangled cove, that if anyone had ever been here before, he must of necessity have sung a song, or written a poem.
— From A Sand County Almanac, “On Top”

I took comfort, when I was overcome by the beauty of the area, that nearly a century before Aldo Leopold had looked upon the same scene and had the same feeling. One morning, shortly before dawn outside an old ranger cabin on the Middle Fork of the Gila River, deep in the Gila Wilderness, I wondered if Leopold had woken up early one morning and watched the sun reflect on the same canyon walls while contemplating some new insight into the workings of the universe.

Hiking to the top of Escudilla, the oddly humped mountain that looms on the horizon anywhere there’s a clear view over the trees and ridgelines, my thoughts would wander to the old grizzly who haunted the steep slopes of the mountain in Leopold’s day. It was the last grizzly in the area, perhaps in the state. After writing about the bear's demise, he concludes his essay, “Escudilla,” with this line: “Escudilla still hangs on the horizon, but when you see it you no longer think of bear. It's only a mountain now.”

I don't think Leopold realized that, with those words, he ensured—a century after the last grizzly paw prints were left on the mountain—that people would still feel the presence of the great bear in the aspen groves and Ponderosa pine stands at the top of Escudilla.

It is ironic that the only connection thousands of other visitors, and indeed residents of the area, have to Aldo Leopold is when they pull their car off the road and use the outhouse at the “Aldo Leopold Vista.” They admire the inspiring view of the Gila Wilderness, perhaps read the plaque explaining Leopold's role in proposing the country's first wilderness area, and drive on. I am truly fortunate to have experienced more—the opportunity to stand in and hopefully in some ways follow the footsteps of Aldo Leopold.

Additional resources:
Books by Aldo Leopold
Aldo Leopold Centennial Celebration
The Aldo Leopold Foundation
Read about other Eco Heroes

[If you know someone who is deserving of an Eco Hero profile on EcoHearth.com, please contact us. – Ed.]

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