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Commentary: Ecological genius played huge role in shaping New Mexico's landscape, environment

Dewey Moore
Wednesday, January 16, 2008

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Fresh out of Yale, where his strong attraction to the outdoors had led him to study forestry, Aldo Leopold arrived in Albuquerque early in July 1909 and began working in the forests of southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona.

His headquarters was in Springerville, Ariz. — a two-day, 85-mile stagecoach ride from where the train would leave him off in Holbrook, Ariz.

In these and other forests he later supervised in New Mexico, Leopold observed overgrazing, overstocking, erosion, successions of plants, prey-and-predators relations and the role of fire in a natural setting. These provided the facts, clues and impressions that led him to his final conclusions about the relation between humans, their cultures and the land.

According to Curt D. Meine, author of the biography, "Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work," Leopold once wrote, "The reaction of land to occupancy determines the nature and duration of civilization." Leopold devoted his life to raising awareness about the public cost of the private use of land.

Leopold's lyrical and articulate writings, especially "A Sand County Almanac," made him the nation's most influential thinker about the relationship between humans and ecological realities, about carrying capacities and, in a term not invented in his lifetime, about sustainability.

An indication of Leopold's awakening understanding occurred during a 1919 horseback inspection trip he made deep into the Gila National Forest, when he resolved to do what he could to keep those forests free of "civilizing" influences, such as roads.

His efforts, with some like-minded supporters, resulted in 755,000 acres being set aside by the Forest Service on June 3, 1924, as the Gila Wilderness — the first wilderness area in the country. In 1980, the National Wilderness Preservation System formalized this wilderness and added the contiguous Aldo Leopold Wilderness and Blue Range Primitive Area.

While working in the Carson National Forest, Leopold courted and then married Maria Alvira Estella Bergere. She came from a very prominent New Mexican family and was born at Los Lunas in 1890. They were married on Oct. 9, 1912, at the Cathedral of St. Francis in Santa Fe.

Shortly after their marriage, a life-threatening bout of nephritis and a 17-month convalescence, Leopold would spend most of the remainder of his 15 years in New Mexico living at 135 S. Fourth Street in Albuquerque, and working behind a desk for the Forest Service.

During this time, his focus shifted to game management. He was a prime mover in establishing game preservation organizations, game preservation laws and the office of State Game Warden. This made New Mexico one of the most progressive states in the nation in this regard.

He often found himself as the negotiator between hunters and preservationists. The tension from the extreme positions of these two groups still exists, as is displayed by the bullet holes in a Gila Wilderness plaque honoring Leopold, which has since been replaced.

Even after Leopold, his wife and their four (at that time) children moved to Madison, Wis., in 1924, he returned to the Southwest to continue to work with colleagues to make changes in conservation policy, to hunt and camp, mostly in the Gila, and to give talks.

For example, he spoke in 1933 at the University of New Mexico on "Ecology as an Applied Science." In Las Cruces, he discussed "Wildlife and Soils."

From his position at the University of Wisconsin, he pushed a national conservation agenda, as the nation's first professor of game management, with his book, "Game Management" and with a discipline he invented that later broadened into wildlife management. With the loss of wilderness weighing heavily on his mind, he joined other conservationists to found The Wilderness Society in 1935.

Where did Leopold, a man who taught us so much about our relation to land and to wilderness, come from? Born to a Germanic family attuned to the outdoors and living on the limestone bluffs of Burlington, Iowa, he grew up overlooking sloughs of the Mississippi River, full of migrating water fowl, and hunting in upland prairies and oak-hickory groves, alongside his father and grandfather.

Recognizing that unlimited shooting was not sustainable, Leopold's father modeled a developing conservation ethic by adjusting his hunting practices to give up all duck hunting in the spring, according to Meine's biography.

His daily letters to his family from Lawrenceville Preparatory School in Lawrenceville, N.J., revealed his growing conservation ethic, as he described the relationships among what he had seen on his almost daily, long, solitary walks. Writing long, detailed letters was a lifetime habit.

Meine, in his biography, characterizes Leopold as a responsible rebel fully aware of the dilemmas he caused. He used Leopold's many letters, reports, recorded talks and papers written for professional and lay audiences to analyze the ways in which Leopold's thinking and understanding evolved.

Meine tracks Leopold's boyhood thinking about having enough game to hunt and fish to a man's comprehensive understanding of the interrelations of plants, animals, soil, water and climate and to how humans fit into, or more often disrupt, these relations.

In early letters from prep school, Leopold recounted his killing of crows or even hawks — creatures that threatened the animals he favored. In his last term, he swore off killing crows, an indication that he was beginning to see how the crows fit into the balancing of nature. In these same letters, Leopold described how phoebes are attracted to insects drawn to the smell of skunk cabbages in the spring.

Perhaps Leopold's most famous epiphany occurred in his first years in southwestern New Mexico, after he had shot a wolf. Leopold said, in "A Sand County Almanac":

"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 to 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."

Leopold had opportunities to move into more prestigious positions but chose to stay in Madison. Family always came first. As soon as his children were old enough, they accompanied him on camping, hunting and fishing outings.

In a search for a weekend and holiday getaway, Leopold and his wife bought an abandoned farm on the south side of a bend in the Wisconsin River. The family spent most of their weekends and holidays — often foregoing professional and social events — planting trees or fixing the only remaining building on the farm, a chicken coop.

Today the surviving children describe how much they enjoyed going to "the shack," which is now on the National Register of Historic Places, perhaps the only chicken coop so honored.

It was here, fighting a neighbor's grass fire, that Aldo Leopold died on April 21, 1948, leaving behind five children and his wife.

Whatever their methods, they raised five marvelous children, all of whom became accomplished naturalists and dedicated conservationists: Starker, a wildlife ecologist; Luna, a geohydrologist; Nina, a restoration ecologist and musician; Carl, a plant physiologist; and Estella, a paleobotanist. Starker, Luna and Estella were inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. Carl held an endowed chair at Cornell University.

All New Mexicans have benefited from Leopold's initiatives, so it seems the least we can do is wish him a happy birthday and refresh our thinking based on the thoughts and the role model he has bequeathed us.

Dewey Moore, an adjunct professor with the University of New Mexico's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, retired from the Illinois Geological Survey after 15 years in 2001 as emeritus clay mineralogist and taught at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., for 25 years.