Aldo Leopold

1887-1948 · American · Environmental Ethics, Conservation Philosophy, Wildlife Ecology, Land-Use Philosophy

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

In his early years as a Forest Service officer in New Mexico, Aldo Leopold killed wolves. Policy treated predators as enemies of deer herds. Then he watched the green fire die in the eyes of a wolf he had shot and grasped what he called thinking like a mountain: removing wolves unleashes overpopulation, strips the browse, collapses the soil. That conversion — from conqueror to citizen of the land — runs through his work.

Topics Aldo Leopold addresses

• the land ethic
• the biotic community
• thinking like a mountain
• land health
• the ecological conscience
• integrity, stability, and beauty
• the land pyramid
• extension of ethics to land
• land as community not commodity
• the A-B cleavage
• conservation as harmony with land
• predator-prey ecology
• the wolf and the deer
• game management as scientific discipline
• carrying capacity
• wildlife population dynamics
• wilderness preservation
• utilitarian conservation versus preservationism
• the conservation ethic
• land use ethics
• the round river
• rejection of the conqueror role
• aesthetic dimension of conservation
• the ecological education of the citizen

Questions to put to Aldo Leopold

The Land Ethic and the Biotic Community

• What do you mean by the land ethic?
• How is the biotic community different from just a collection of plants and animals?
• Why do you say integrity, stability, and beauty together — aren't those three separate things?
• How does ethics extend from the human community to include soils and waters?
• What does it mean to be a plain member and citizen of the land rather than its conqueror?

Thinking Like a Mountain and Predator Ecology

• What happened when you shot the wolf and saw the green fire die in its eyes?
• What does it mean to think like a mountain?
• Why did removing wolves cause the mountain itself to deteriorate?
• How did you move from the Forest Service's predator-control orthodoxy to predator preservation?
• Is the wolf's role in the landscape just an empirical fact or does it carry a larger ethical lesson?

Game Management and Wildlife Science

• How did you establish game management as a scientific discipline?
• What is carrying capacity and why does it matter for wildlife populations?
• How can hunting be part of the land ethic if the ethic extends moral concern to animals?
• What's the difference between managing deer as a crop and treating them as mere resources?
• How do you balance human use of wildlife with the health of the biotic community?

Wilderness Preservation and the Wilderness Movement

• Why did you co-found the Wilderness Society in 1935?
• What makes wilderness valuable if humans aren't supposed to conquer land anyway?
• How do you respond to the criticism that wilderness is just a romantic idea of urban Americans?
• Is wilderness the opposite of human use or a different form of land use?
• What would we lose if every landscape became managed or industrial?

The Sand County Experience and the Almanac

• Why did you structure A Sand County Almanac as a month-by-month almanac?
• What did restoring the worn-out Sauk County farm teach you about land health?
• How does planting pines and watching geese return connect to the land ethic?
• What's the relationship between aesthetic perception of the land and ecological understanding?
• Why does the ecological conscience require both science and direct experience of the land?

Conservation Ethics and the A-B Cleavage

• What do you mean by the A-B cleavage in conservation attitudes?
• How is your land ethic different from Pinchot's utilitarian conservation?
• What's at stake for you in the distinction between conservation as harmony with land versus conservation as efficient use?
• Can the land ethic accommodate economic use of land or does it require preservation?
• How does the ecological conscience change what counts as good land use?

Converse with Aldo Leopold on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Aldo Leopold's own writing, cited to the page.