Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey, Tenth Anniversary Edition

As Leopold was piecing together the erosion story in the Southwest and beginning his professional game protection work—between 1914 and the mid-1920s—the world was changing rapidly around him. Millions died in the Great War and from an influenza pandemic, and political boundaries in Europe were redrawn. On the American plains farmers plowed millions of acres of land, transforming much of the vast, fertile American prairie. In the fall of 1917, 42,170,000 acres were planted in wheat, 1 million more than in any preceding year and 7 million more than the preceding five-year average. Meanwhile, agricultural prices fluctuated widely. Wheat, corn, and livestock prices nearly doubled between 1914 and 1919, only to drop precipitously after the war. As prices fell, hundreds of thousands of struggling farmers lost their farms—450,000 farmers in 1920 and 1921 alone went bankrupt. By 1920 more than half the land area of the United States was taken up by farms, yet rural people increasingly were moving into cities—by that year half the country’s roughly 100 million people were urban dwellers. Meanwhile, millions of automobiles were rolling off assembly lines, and to carry these cars, hundreds of thousands of miles of public roads were transecting the country. Trade unions formed and fractured, labor riots erupted, and the population became increasingly diverse in ethnic background as nearly 3 million immigrants entered the country between 1914 and 1920. For many it became ever harder to make sense of the world. The 1914 comments of Walter Lippman, essayist and editor of the New Republic, seemed even more apt after the war: “We are unsettled to the very roots of our being.” A social radical, John Reed, summed up the postwar times similarly, from the view of a man turning thirty:

For Leopold, by the late 1930s it had become a regular drumbeat: Conservation was not chiefly about restoring and protecting land. It was about improving people and transforming culture, rebuilding values from the ground up. It was about making “a new kind of people,” as he said in his letter to former student Douglas Wade; it was about “rebuilding Homo sapiens” and producing a “new kind of farmer, banker, voter, consumer, etc.,” as he phrased it for Morris Cooke. How could we change the ways we use land, Leopold asked, without “an internal change in our intellectual emphases, our loyalties, our affections, and our convictions”? How could we “improve the face of the land without improving ourselves”?