A Fierce Green Fire: Aldo Leopold's Life and Legacy

401 Pages·2016·42.527 MB·English

by  Marybeth Lorbiecki

A Fierce Green Fire

A Fierce Green Fire
Aldo Leopold’s Life and Legacy
NEW EDITION
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Marybeth Lorbiecki
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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© Marybeth Lorbiecki 2016
First Edition published in 1996
New Edition published in 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Lorbiecki, Marybeth.
[Aldo Leopold]
A fierce green fire : Aldo Leopold’s life and legacy / Marybeth Lorbiecki. — 2nd edition.
pages cm
Previous editions have title: Aldo Leopold : a fierce green fire.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–996503–8
1. Leopold, Aldo, 1886–1948. 2. Naturalists—Wisconsin—Biography.
3. Conservationists—Wisconsin—Biography. I. Title.
QH31.L618L66 2015
508.092—dc23
[B]
2015019906
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan, USA
For Julie Dunlap, a spiritual daughter of Aldo,
And for Nina, who carried on his dream at the Shack
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Nina with her dog relaxing at the Shack.

CONTENTS
Author’s Note ix
Foreword: “A Daughter’s Reflections” (by Nina Leopold Bradley) and
Reflections upon these Reflections xvii
PART ONE: Aldo Leopold’s Life and Writings
1. Lug- Ins- Land: 1887– 1901 3
2. Ornithologists and Explorations: 1901– 1903 16
3. The Naturalist Out East: 1903– 1905 22
4. Women and Wise Use: 1905– 1909 31
5. A Cowboy in Love: 1909– 1912 39
6. New Life and Near Death: 1912– 1914 51
7. Save That Game: 1915– 1919 60
8. A Wild Proposal: 1919– 1924 74
9. Surveying the Field: 1924– 1933 86
10. The Land Laboratories: 1933– 1936 108
11. The Professor: 1937– 1939 128
12. Paths of Violence: 1939– 1945 139
13. Great Possessions: 1945– 1948 152
14. Adios and Happy Trails 160
PART TWO: Updates from Here and There
15. All in the Family 165
16. Aldo’s Students and Colleagues 204
17. The Shack, the Aldo Leopold Foundation,
and Other Leopold Initiatives 226
18. The Wilderness Idea 239
19. The Endangered Species and Youth: 
Keeping All the Cogs and Wheels 254
20. The Farmer as Conservationist … and Restorationist 276
21. The Round River of Ecological Economics and Development 285
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viii—Contents
PART THREE: The Upshot
22. The Land Ethic 299
23. Love and the Restoration of Ourselves 316
Acknowledgments 329
Notes 331
Works by Aldo Leopold 351
Selected References 353
Index 355
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted
until progress began to do away with them.
Now we face the question whether a still higher “standard of living”
is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.
For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese
is more important than television,
and the chance to find a pasque- flower
is a right as inalienable as free speech.
Foreword, A Sand County Almanac
After a long day of rain, wind, and swampy portages, we pitch our tent.
A misty blanket settles over the melon- tinted horizon, and the long, eerie
trill of a loon drifts over air.  Neither humming motors nor their exhaust dull
our spirits. City lights do not dim the skies. The stars are crisp and startling
in the blackness, and the air smells of pine. Later, if we are lucky, the distant
howl of a wolf will jerk us out of sleep.
It’s hard to imagine what this beloved place and the American landscape
might look like if Aldo Leopold hadn’t come along when he did. Would my
tenting spot in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA), atop a slab of
pine- dotted granite, now be the site of a tourist condominium? Would the
forests of the Southwest have declined into desert? How many game spe-
cies, like deer, quail, woodcocks, and various waterfowl, would have gone
extinct? And wolves— would they too have been completely hunted, trapped,
or poisoned away?
Aldo Leopold was a game changer in every aspect of the conservation
movement.
His famed book of personal essays A Sand County Almanac and Sketches
Here and There has been dubbed “the conservationist’s bible” and Leopold,
an American prophet.1 For those of us who have often read the Almanac, his
words are as familiar as our backpacks, canoes, and walking sticks. They
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