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To Leopold the dust bowl was a tragic example of
progress gone awry.
Clearly people could destroy an environment,
but was it possible for one person to nurse a ravaged
wilderness back to health?
By 1934 Leopold had become a professor at the
University of Wisconsin.
He purchased a worn out farm.
A hundred-twenty dusty acres with a single building,
a large chicken coop filled knee deep with manure.
The Leopold family called the place the Shack.
It was dismal beyond belief.
It was acres and acres of corn stubble mixed with the cockle
burrs and sand burrs, and an old burned down house and a
chicken shed which became the Shack.
We came first in a February blizzard when it was very cold
and dismal, and it was pretty hard to see what Dad had in
mind buying this old piece of land.
"One hundred and twenty acres according to the county clerk,
is the extent of my worldly domain.
But it is a fact patent to both my dog and myself that at day
break I am the sole owner of all the acres I can walk on.
It is not only boundaries that disappear,
but also the thought of being bounded."
To Leopold, the conservationists,
the person preserving land,
leaves a mark on that land.
Manages toward the health of the community to have as many
creatures as many organisms living on that land as possible.
So that it really is possible to manipulate wilderness to
make it more wild.
And that seems paradoxical, I think,
for people who imagine that wilderness is a place that you
just let be and let it go just by itself.
That's not what Leopold did.
For Leopold, the Shack was both weekend
retreat and field laboratory.
His wife and five children joined him in his work.
In the first year they gutted the chicken coop and built
bunks from drift wood.
They built an outhouse and called it the Parthenon.
Instead of cultivating a front lawn they tried to
restore a prairie.
They planted over three thousand trees.
That first summer it didn't rain.
"Tamaracks, fifty percent dead.
Norway pines, ninety five percent dead.
White pines, ninety-nine percent dead.
Mountain ash, one hundred percent dead.
Grapes, all alive, but one."
We spent a lot of time in the
field with Dad, and that meant that it was quite easy to fall
in love with nature.
We'd be taking a walk and I can remember his stopping and
saying, "Well, baby," that's what he called me,
"what do you think this means?
Look at this plant.
What's the matter with it?"
" Well, the top had been eaten off."
And I'd say, "Well, something ate it." "Well, what ate it?"
"and you know he'd go on and build from there.
Or we'd see a sand bar with some tracks on it and he'd say,
"What do you think happened here, honey?"
And we'd try and put it together and he'd say, "Yeah,
but look, that owl stooped here before it carried the carcass
over there and ate it and all those feathers are laying
around it over there."
Within ten years the Leopolds had a
healthy pine forest and a thriving prairie
in their front yard.
Aldo Leopold noted, "The trees are getting
awkward to measure."
While Leopold was nursing a single farm back to
health the American wilderness as a whole faced a threat from
an unlikely and unwitting opponent,
President Franklin D Roosevelt.
"President Roosevelt's attack on the Depression began with
his emergency conservation project.
The President's profound interest in this work prompted
him to visit and personally inspect several of the
conservation camps.
He talked with the men.
He ate the same food that they ate.
He saw men who had been without jobs, and without hope,
happy and productive employment."
The 1930's, obviously,
is dominated by the Depression.
And there were various public works project.
The CCC camps and other improvements out in the country
that were great as employment relief measures because they
were very labor intensive and low skill.
You could put thousands of people to work at low wages to
get them out of the cities.
It was very effective as a Depression relieving measure,
but it was very harmful to the wilderness because these public
works were not designed to protect the wilderness or with
any ecological sense whatsoever.
Aldo Leopold supervised conservation crews as they
remodeled the wilderness.
The experience was not altogether encouraging.
"There was, for example, the road side clean up crew,
burning all the wood available for the fireplaces being built
by the recreation crew.
The planting crew setting pines all over the only open clover
patch available to the deer and partridges.
And the fireline crew felling all the gnarled veterans which
were about the only scenic thing along the scenic road."
Both Leopold and Marshall realized that New Deal
conservation programs weren't conserving wild land;
they were slicing it to pieces.
Marshall, working in the Forest Service,
fought to have huge chunks of government land
designated as wilderness.
But his vision was even more radical.
"Every acre of wood land in the country," he said,
"should belong to the people."
Bob Marshall's socialism was
very much of the 1930's.
Many people were socialist in the 1930's
because of the Depression.
The terrible crisis that that brought about in American life.
It has implications for his forestry,
for his wilderness work, in that he's a kind of a socialist
in the woods.
His book of 1933, The People's Forest ,
urged finally that every acre of lumber land in the country
be owned and administered by the government.
Now you can image how the lumber companies might have
reacted to that.
And that was an extraordinary position for the time or for
our time for a forester to take.
"ONE, TWO, THREE!!"
As the Depression lifted the natural landscape was threatened
by a new and more subtle enemy, tourism.
In four years National Park attendance tripled.
The wilderness was in danger of being loved to death.
Tourists came by automobile on the the newly built,
New Deal roads.
When urged to keep park roads to a minimum FDR responded,
"How would I get in?"
But the expanding web of roads worried Marshall.
When the government wanted to pave the mountain passes along
the Blue Ridge of the Smokies, Marshall and his friends set out
to stop it.
One day, while taking a drive through Great Smoky Mountains
National Park they were struck by an idea.
There was no organization, whose
sole purpose was the defense of wilderness.
They puld the car off the road and founded
the Wilderness Society.
You wouldn't expect much to have happened from this,
or for this to be representative of much.
But in fact it was the living embodiment of a revolution of
ideas in American land policy.
For the first time in history an organization had gotten
together whose main and whose only purpose was to preserve
land in its natural state.
It had no other purpose.
"What is needed is a society of spirited individuals who will
fight for the freedom of wilderness.
We want no straddlers.
For in the past they have surrendered too much good
wilderness which should never have been lost.
I have a long list of people who should not be admitted."
The one person Bob Marshall did want admitted was Aldo Leopold.
Although Marshall founded and funded the Wilderness Society,
Leopold was it's inspiration.
"You are the commanding general of the wilderness battle",
Marshall wrote.
In April 1937 the society held it's first full membership
meeting in Washington.
Two years latter Bob Marshall was dead.
The man who could walk seventy miles in a day died of a heart
attack in his sleep on the train to New York.
He was thirty-eight.
Bob Marshall inspired the Wilderness Movement by his
example and his legend, but he died at a time when wilderness
preservation was anything but a priority.
The world was mobilizing for war.
"Santa Monica, California, six hundred and thirty-two skilled
workers have reported back to the Douglas Aircraft plant.
Turning out an average of ten planes a week."
Aldo Leopold, "I disagree that we should make any
blanket sacrifices of
wilderness value simply on the chance that we might need them
in another war.
If we lose our wilderness we have nothing left,
in my opinion, worth fighting for.
Or to be more exact, a completely industrialized
United States is of no consequence."
"Middle Town, Ohio.
They're busier now than they've been in fifteen years.
The factories operating at near capacity for Old Uncle Sam."
Cultures come and go and Leopold knew that.
Evolution doesn't issue any guarantees.
There's no guarantee that American society will be here a
hundred years from now.
So, his concern is not to undermine American society,
but to help American society focus in on those things that
are essential to the future.
♪♪♪
Leopold began to think that people had lost their ability
to live within the larger community of life.
In his writings his work at the Shack became a metaphor for
human interactions with the land.
His notebooks gradually evolved into a book,
A Sand County Almanac .
" A Sand County Almanac has continued to be important.
Listen to those geese, it's marvelous.
My Father would really revel in this because in our. in the
days when the Shack was firs built it was rare for us to see
a goose to say nothing of looking over and seeing a
thousand passing overhead.
A Sand County Almanac has endured because
it is saying things that people
feel deep in their heart, but don't know how to articulate.
The sense of relationship to land, the morality of man
relative to other species, the importance of transitory beauty
of the kind that you're seeing here.
All these things mankind searches for and when,
and this is like all great writings-
Great writings become famous because
they express something that people feel in their heart."
"The sense of time lies thick
and heavy on such a place.
Yearly since the Ice Age it has awakened each spring to the
clangor of cranes.
Our ability to perceive quality of nature begins, as in
art, with the pretty.
It expands through successive stages of the
beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.
The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut.
Our appreciation of the crane grows with the slow unraveling
of earthly history.
When we hear his call we hear no mere bird- we hear the
trumpet in the orchestra of evolution.
He is the symbol of our untamable past,
of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and
conditions the daily affairs of birds and men."
Aldo Leopold is a person whose
quotations spring to the lips like
Biblical quotations.
He really is a kind of holy book in matters of ecology.
One of the very early ecologists and one of the
very penetrating ones.
Every time I think I've had a thought about the environment
it turns out I stole it from Aldo Leopold.
A Sand County Almanac raises the most fundamental questions
of philosophy.
What is the nature of the world that we live in?
What does it mean to be human?
And what is the what is an appropriate relationship,
human relationship, to the natural world?
These are the big questions of philosophy.
♪♪♪
Leopold believed that people were holding the land in a kind
of slavery that was as morally wrong as human slavery.
What was needed, he argued, was a land ethic,
a moral basis for our relationship to the land and
everything within it.
Leopold was making a breakthrough, I think,