Thinking like a mountain: is the predator-preservation argument an empirical-ecological insight that no longer needs philosophical defense, or does it still carry the larger ethical claim about the collapse of the conqueror perspective?

Aldo Leopold, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The mountain knows what the conqueror does not. Thinking like a mountain is the shorthand for the ecological perspective that sees what the human pursuit of game-population maximization cannot see — that the wolves removed from the landscape unleash a mountain-scale catastrophe of deer overpopulation, browse-line erosion, soil collapse, and forest decline.12

The conversion from the early Forest Service orthodoxy of predator extermination to the late position of predator preservation is not merely an empirical correction; it is the structural collapse of the conqueror posture toward land in favour of a community membership that sees the wolf as a constitutive part of the land's health rather than an enemy of human use of it.

The famous essay narrates the moment when I watched the green fire die in the eyes of a wolf I had shot — and began to understand what the mountain understood.34

Sources

  1. I hear young people, not yet born when I first rode out 'on top,' exclaim about it as a wonderful place. To this, with an unspoken mental reservation, I agree. A Thinking Like a Mountain DEEP CHESTY bawl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far blackness of the night. It is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow, and of contempt for all the adversities of the world.
    A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There, pp. 161–162
  2. The game-keeper buys an unnatural abundance of pheasants at the expense of the public's hawks and owls. The fish-culturist buys an unnatural abundance of fish at the expense of the public's herons, mergansers, and terns. The forester buys an unnatural increment of wood at the expense of the soil, and in that wood maintains an unnatural abundance of deer at the expense of all palatable shrubs and herbs.
    RILEY GAME COOPERATIVE, pp. 228–230
  3. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock. In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing.
    A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There, pp. 162–166
  4. In "Escudilla," I relate my own participation in the extinguishment of the grizzly bear from the White Mountain region. At the time I sensed only a vague uneasiness about the ethics of this action.
    A Sand County Almanac and Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation, pp. 1191–1192

Where the argument is made

  • 'Thinking Like a Mountain' (1944, in A Sand County Almanac, Part II 'Sketches Here and There,' Arizona and New Mexico) — the famous wolf-killing conversion essay
  • the early Forest Service writings on predator control in Aldo Leopold's Southwest
  • 'Wilderness as a Form of Land Use' (1925, in River of the Mother of God) and the predator-preservation correspondence
  • Game Management (1933) on predation, carrying capacity, and population dynamics

How the argument was received

Susan L. Flader's Thinking Like a Mountain (Missouri, 1974) traces the evolution of my thinking on deer, wolves, and predation from the early Forest Service period through the 1944 essay. The contemporary trophic-cascade ecology — the Yellowstone wolf-reintroduction work after 1995, the Estes-Terborgh kelp-otter and Aleutian-island studies, the broader science of top-down ecological regulation — empirically vindicates the prediction. The ecological insight is now scientific orthodoxy and the wolf-bounty Forest Service of the 1910s-1920s seems to most readers obviously misguided. The philosophical question is what ethical work remains beyond the empirical vindication.