2. Written on the Hills

C. D. Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 136.

Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 145. A thoughtful survey of the interactions of Americans with wildlife in the West is offered in D. Worster, An Unsettled Country: Changing Landscapes of the American West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), pp. 55–90.

J.W. Chambers II, ed., The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 234; W. E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 15.

Wilson, “Foreign Trade,” p. 57.

W. Wilson, “A New President’s Principles,” first inaugural address, 4 March 1913, p. 2.

AL, “The Maintenance of the Forests,” RMG, pp. 38–39; AL, “The Popular Wilderness Fallacy: An Idea That Is Fast Exploding,” RMG, p. 49.

AL, “The Popular Wilderness Fallacy: An Idea That Is Fast Exploding,” RMG, pp. 47, 52.

Ibid., p. 92.

U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1920 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921), p. 180; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1930 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1930), p. 730. By the end of the decade, the number of cattle grazing on the national forests had been reduced to 1,322,465.

The Pine Cone: Official Bulletin of the Albuquerque Game Protective Association (Christmas 1915), LP 10-6, 1.

Ibid., p. 144.

Ibid., p. 156.

Ibid., p. 157. Leopold and Tusayan supervisor Don P. Johnston in the fall of 1916 drafted the “Grand Canyon Working Plan,” the first comprehensive recreational plan for this national wonder; LP 10-11, 1. It suggested establishing a zoning system for uses and called for a crackdown on “repugnant” business practices.

Ibid., p. 159.

Ibid., p. 165.

Ibid., p. 165; AL, “The Civic Life of Albuquerque,” speech, 27 September 1918, p. 5, LP 10-8, 9. Also see Leopold’s 1917 “Progressive Cattle Range Management,” Breeder’s Gazette 71, no. 18 (3 May 1917): 919, in which he pointed out the benefit of stock growers’ associations made up of groups of neighboring landowners who cooperated in maintaining range standards and regulated many of their own range activities.

Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 167; AL, “What about Drainage?” Bernalillo County Farm Bureau News 1, no. 1 (June 1918): 2. In later years, Leopold would view indiscriminate wetland draining as harmful to wildlife and other land values.

AL, “Relative Abundance of Ducks in the Rio Grande Valley,” Condor 21, no. 3 (1919): 122; AL, “Notes on the Weights and Plumages of Ducks in New Mexico,” Condor 21, no. 3 (1919): 128; AL, “Notes on the Behavior of Pintail Ducks in a Hailstorm,” Condor 21, no. 2 (1919): 87, also in RMG, p. 60.

AL, “Are Red-headed Woodpeckers Moving West?” Condor 20, no. 3 (1918): 122. Supporting this thesis, Leopold had spotted within a quarter mile of the main line of the Santa Fe railroad yet another adult red-headed woodpecker on 18 August 1918. See AL, “Notes on Red-headed Woodpecker and Jack Snipe in New Mexico,” Condor 21, no. 1 (1919): 40.

Leopold wrote several articles on the business aspects of the Forest Service. See, e.g., AL, “The National Forests: The Last Free Hunting Grounds of the Nation,” Journal of Forestry 17, no. 2 (1919): 150–153. In this article Leopold asserts that the demand for hunting on the national forests exceeds supply and that it is not only practical but also a public duty and responsibility of foresters to help develop a practice of scientific game management to promote an abundant game supply. He also predicts that widespread game farming will lead to commercialization of hunting privileges on private lands, which he believes would be the end of free hunting and a crime against democracy in America unless public lands could provide hunting opportunities. As the demand for hunting on national forests increased with population, ease of transportation, and the cost of hunting elsewhere, Leopold suggested, it also would be good business sense for the Forest Service to develop species on which they would have a practical monopoly—in other words, on those species (e.g., mountain sheep, wild turkeys, javelins, white goats) that were more sensitive to human disruption or required a wider range or more rugged territory than most private lands were likely to provide. In another article, “Forest Service Salaries and the Future of the National Forests,” Journal of Forestry 17, no. 4 (1919): 398–401, he complained that low wages for Forest Service employees were lowering the public prestige of the Service and discouraging competent men from joining it. Without sufficient salaries, the Service would be demoralized, efficiency would decrease, public support would be alienated, and the whole structure of technical national forestry would be undermined, with widespread and profound effects rippling through other fields of conservation. He argued for the organization of public opinion regarding the whole “great cause of national forestry” in order to pressure Congress for higher salaries. He also recommended that foresters themselves promote the idea of political action on behalf of forestry in their interactions with influential private landowners and organize federal employee unions. For a discussion of Leopold’s Forest Service legacy see S. Flader, “Aldo Leopold’s Legacy to Forestry,” Forest History Today (1998): 2–5.

^* Leopold generally used the term “game” when talking about animals hunted for sport or as a natural resource, a subset of the broader category “wild life,” which also included nongame species. Sometime in the mid-1930s, at least by 1936, “wild life” became “wildlife” for Leopold and others. In the 1930s, too, a shift occurred within the conservation movement from usage of “game” in organizational names to the more inclusive term “wildlife,” tracking with the broadening concerns of the times. When discussing matters relevant to sport species, I use the term “game,” and when referring to the more inclusive category, I use the one-word term in current usage, “wildlife.”

Ibid., p. 175.

AL, “Topic #60, The D-3 Notebook Tally Sheet: A Combination Inspection Outline and Report Talk Given at Special Fire Conference,” 10 November 1921, LP 10-6, 2; AL, letter to Frank Pooler, District Forester, 2 February 1925, subject “Supervision, Inspection, D-3.”

AL, “Tonto Inspection Report,” handwritten notebook, 1923, p. 106, LP 10- 11, 3.

J. Baird Callicott draws attention to Leopold’s interest in soil in “Standards of Conservation: Then and Now,” Conservation Biology 4 (1990): 229–232, as does Susan Flader in “Let the Fire Devil Have His Due: Aldo Leopold and the Conundrum of Wilderness Management,” in Managing America’s Enduring Wilderness Resource, edited by D. Lime (St. Paul: Minnesota Extension Service, 1990).

The term “oecology” had been coined by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866. Ecology did not become a formal science with its own professional organizations until the twentieth century, however. In 1913 the British Ecological Society was founded; in 1915 the Ecological Society of America was formed. Leopold had become familiar with the new discipline of ecology by at least 1920 and thereafter referred to ecological science and ideas with increasing frequency and familiarity. See, e.g., AL, “The Forestry of the Prophets,” Journal of Forestry 18, no. 4 (April 1920): 412–419, also in RMG, p. 76 (“Isaiah seems to have had some knowledge of … the ecological relations of species”); AL, “Report of General Inspection of Prescott National Forest,” 31 July–1 September 1922, LP 10-11, 1, section on fire, p. 1; AL, “Ecology of Brush Type”; AL, “Erosion as a Menace to the Social and Economic Future of the Southwest,” speech read at the meeting of the New Mexico Association for Science in 1922 and later published, with an introduction by H. H. Chapman, in Journal of Forestry 44, no. 9 (September 1946): 627–633 and 630, on ecological balance. Chapman uncovered the article and submitted it to the journal. See also AL, “Tonto Inspection Report,” p. 3: “Southern Arizona ecology.”

AL, Watershed Handbook (Albuquerque: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, District 3, December 1923 [revised and reissued October 1934]), p. 10, LP 10-11, 1. Leopold inspected the Prescott from 31 July to 1 September 1922; AL, “Inspection Report: Prescott NF1922,” n.d., approved by District Forester Frank Pooler ca. 6 October 1922, p. 1, LP 10-11, 3 (10); AL, “A Plea for Recognition of Artificial Works in Forest Erosion Control Policy,” Journal of Forestry 19, no. 3 (1921): 267.

In addition to soils disappearing, Leopold also chronicled the disappearance of wildlife and wilderness in the area. AL, “Escudilla,” SCA, pp. 133–136.

Ibid., p. 65; AL, “Erosion and Prosperity,” 18 January 1921, p. 4, LP 10-8, 9. “Erosion and Prosperity” was a talk given during the observation of Farmers’ Week at the University of Arizona. Olmstead, Gila River Flood Control, p. 68; W. Barnes, Western Grazing Grounds and Forest Ranges: A History of the Live-Stock Industry as Conducted on the Open Ranges of the Arid West (Chicago: Breeder’s Gazette, 1913), pp. 226–245.

Ibid., p. 68.

Ibid.; AL, “Plea for Recognition,” p. 270.

AL, “Erosion and Prosperity.”

AL, “Pioneers and Gullies,” RMG; AL, “Erosion as a Menace.”

AL, “Erosion as a Menace,” p. 628.

Ibid., p. 627.

AL, “Erosion and Prosperity,” p. 3.

Ibid.

AL, “Pioneers and Gullies,” RMG, p. 106.

AL, “Pioneers and Gullies,” RMG, p. 107.

AL, “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest,” RMG, p. 89; AL, “Skill in Forestry,” unfinished manuscript, ca. 1922, p. 178, LP 10-6, 17. See also AL, “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest,” RMG, p. 95: “Possibly in our intuitive perceptions, which may be truer than our science and less impeded by words than our philosophies, we realize the indivisibility of the earth—its soils, mountains, rivers, forests, climate, plants, and animals, and respect it collectively not only as a useful servant but as a living being.”

Ibid., p. 94.

Ibid.

AL, “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest,” RMG, pp. 86–97.

AL, “Erosion and Prosperity,” p. 5.

Leopold commented in a 14 November 1913 letter titled “To the Boys on the Job,” written while he was recuperating from nephritis in Burlington and published in the December 1913 issue of Carson Pine Cone: “In the endeavor to find a satisfactory substitute for something to do, I have found the nearest approach to satisfaction in browsing around in books. It’s pretty poor pickin’ without the salt of reality, but so be it. … A new book of great interest to Forest Officers is Inspector Will C. Barnes ‘Western Grazing Grounds and Forest Ranges.’” LP 10-11, 1. Leopold reported results of a grazing experiment on the Manti forest in his Watershed Handbook (December 1923), p. 6. In 1912 two small watersheds on the Utah forest had been fenced for study and placed under continuous observation to determine comparative effects of various degrees of grazing on forage cover and water flow. Heavy grazing reduced and reconfigured vegetation; compacted soil; increased storm water runoff, erosion, and silting; and increased soil nutrient leaching. Leopold noted that most of the conclusions from Utah were true of the Southwest as well.

Ibid., p. 7.

Ibid., p. 12.

Ibid., p. 13.

Ibid. For a discussion of how surveying affected the settlement and use of land see C. Meine, “Inherit the Grid,” in Correction Lines: Essays on Land, Leopold, and Conservation (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004), pp. 188–209.

By 1878 explorer and scientist John Wesley Powell had tried to explain what was becoming increasingly evident through widespread land-use failure— that successful agricultural settlement on dry western lands was a tricky business. Powell had explained decades earlier that success would require irrigation, which in turn would require cooperative communal practices. Furthermore, 160 acres was far too little land on which to make a living where it may take 35–50 acres to graze one head of cattle. The need for irrigation was obvious, and the federal government had responded in due course with the Reclamation Act of 1902.The need to share limited resources would make it increasingly obvious that cooperation would be necessary among community landowners and between public and private interests. The Forest Service’s mission to control private use in the public interest was a model of such recognition. In the 1920s a few modest experiments in voluntary land-use cooperation took place, and Leopold would in fact urge the necessity of such efforts in many of his forestry-related publications. The government did establish ways in which citizens could possess greater areas, such as the 1916 Stock-Raising Homestead Act, which allowed 640-acre applications, but this still fell far short of the large allotments Powell had called for. Overall, the government denied outright the harsh evidence that successful agriculture in arid lands could be sustained only if it was spread out over thousands of acres of land, not mere hundreds. See W. deBuys, ed., Seeing Things Whole: The Essential John Wesley Powell (Washington, DC: Island Press, Shearwater Books, 2001), and Gates, History of Public Land Law Development, p. 514. See D. Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). The continuation of homesteading in the arid parts of the West into the 1920s is considered in E. L. Peffer, The Closing of the Public Domain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1951), pp. 134–180.

AL, “Erosion as a Menace,” p. 632.

AL, “Inspection Report: Prescott NF 1922,” p. 1 of section titled “General Appraisal of Prescott Forest.”

AL, “Inspection Report: Prescott NF 1920,” 15 May 1920, p. 1, LP 10-11, 3 (4).

Ibid.

AL, “Plea for Recognition,” p. 267.

AL, “Inspection Report: Prescott NF 1920,” p. 1.

Ibid., p. 2.

AL, “Plea for Recognition,” pp. 267–273.

Ibid., p. 267.

AL, “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest,” RMG, p. 93.

AL, “Pioneers and Gullies,” RMG, p. 111.

AL, “Grass, Brush, Timber, and Fire in Southern Arizona,” RMG, p. 114.

AL, “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest,” RMG, p. 89.

Ibid., pp. 89–90.

AL, “Inspection Report: Prescott NF 1922.”

Ibid.

Ibid., handwritten notes; no page number.

Ibid. See also AL, “Standards of Conservation,” RMG, p. 83.

AL, “Standards of Conservation,” RMG, p. 83.

Ibid.

AL, “Plea for Recognition,” p. 268.

AL, “Tonto Inspection Report,” LP 10-11, 3; AL, “Grass, Brush, Timber, and Fire in Southern Arizona,” RMG, p. 115. These types characterized the greater parts of the Prescott, Tonto, Coronado, and Crook national forests, as well as much range outside the public lands.

Leopold’s discussion of this process in his “Grass, Brush, Timber, and Fire in Southern Arizona” (RMG) included the use of terms popularized by the well-known plant ecologist Frederic Clements, who was famous for his work on vegetational succession. The woodland type was, in Clements’ terminology, the “climax type.” For a similar discussion of the Southwest’s ecological grazing and erosion story, see also A. Leopold, J. S. Ligon, and R. F. Pettit, “Southwestern Game Fields,” first draft of chap. 2, “The Virgin Southwest and What White Man Has Done to It,” pp. 18–20, unpublished draft, 1927–1929, 10 April 1927, LP 10-6, 10.

At the same time that Leopold was piecing together the part fire played in the erosion story of the Southwest—that is, that fire had kept brush and trees from encroaching on grass and that grass was a better conserver of soil than trees in the watersheds of the region—he wrote an article titled “Wild Followers of the Forest: The Effect of Forest Fires on Game and Fish—the Relation of Forests to Game Conservation,” which appeared in the September 1923 issue of American Forestry. Fire suppression was an internal mandate and unquestioned principle of the Forest Service, perhaps an importation from German forestry to American forestry. Leopold himself wrote in 1923 about the destruction fires caused not only to trees but also to wild animals: “[F]ire,” he wrote, “is the enemy of the wild”—in the forest, prairie, and on the farm—though his understanding would change. See AL, “The Virgin Southwest,” RMG, pp. 173–180. Game scientist Herbert Stoddard, a strong influence on Leopold, discussed the importance of fire in game systems in The Bobwhite Quail: Its Habits, Preservation, and Increase (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931), pp. 401–414. See also AL, “Conservationist in Mexico,” p. 240; various 1939 Wisconsin Agriculturalist and Farmer articles by AL, FHL, pp. 105–157; and Susan Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain.

AL, “Grass, Brush, Timber, and Fire in Southern Arizona,” RMG, p. 118.

It had become clear to Leopold by this time, however, that using grazing to control brush fire hazard was virtually impossible; to try to do so was to ignore “the plain story written on the face of Nature” (AL, “Grass, Brush, Timber, and Fire in Southern Arizona,” RMG, p. 118). The brush consisted of numerous species of varied palatability. Grazing the brush, as a number of foresters suggested, was a prescription dangerous to the land. It would merely result in unpalatable species gaining ground while the fire and erosion hazards remained.

AL, “Standards of Conservation,” RMG, pp. 82–85.

J. Baird Callicott proposes that it was never finished because Leopold realized that his own argument implied grazing, which was causing erosion problems in the first place. See Callicott, “Standards of Conservation: Then and Now,” pp. 230–231. See also S. L. Flader, “Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of Ecosystem Management,” in Sustainable Ecological Systems: Implementing an Ecological Approach to Land Management, edited by W.W. Covington and L. F. DeBano (Fort Collins, CO: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station, 1993), pp. 15–19.

AL, “Standards of Conservation,” RMG, p. 82.

Ibid., p. 83.

AL, “Standards of Conservation,” RMG, pp. 83–84.

Unsigned letter to AL, 17 April 1923, p. 1, LP 10-6, 17.

Years later, in 1935, Leopold would diagram the dynamics of the natural erosion cycle in the Southwest, showing in more detail a possible mechanism for erosion related to grazing pressure. His theory was strongly criticized by Kirk Bryan, a prominent geologist and Harvard University professor. Of importance to Leopold as a land manager were human-related problems in human time and spatial scales. Different scalar perspectives may have had something to do with the differences between the ideas of Leopold and Bryan, though Bryan did find evidence of trends inmeteorologic conditions more conducive to erosion at the same time that grazing was promoting erosion. See K. Bryan, “Date of Channel Trenching (Arroyo Cutting) in the Arid Southwest,” Science 62 (1925): 228–344, and K. Bryan, “Change in Plant Associations by Change in Ground Water Level,” Ecology 9 (1928): 474–478. Luna Leopold’s work supported some of Bryan’s evidence. Luna, who studied under Brian, found that fewer small rains and more frequent large rains, which were conducive to weak vegetal cover and greater incidence of erosion, occurred in the mid- to late nineteenth century in the Southwest: “Thus there is established concrete evidence of a climatic factor operating at the time of initiation of Southwestern erosion which no doubt helped to promote the initiation of that erosion.” See L. Leopold, “Rainfall Frequency: An Aspect of Climatic Variation,” Transactions of the American Geophysical Union 32, no. 3 (1951): 347–357. Luna continued to study the subject even into his later years (personal communication, 19 August 2005). See L. Leopold, “Geomorphology: A Sliver off the Corpus of Science,” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 32 (2004): 1–12.

Ibid., p. 4.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

AL, “Erosion as a Menace,” p. 630.

AL, “Erosion as a Menace,” p. 630. The “balance of nature” Leopold recognized in “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest” (RMG, p. 91) “compresses into three words an enormously complex chain of phenomena.” He associated the complex idea with that of “stability,” by which he meant the ability of the land to resist or withstand human abuse. Stable land was, in this sense, land that could tolerate intensive human use without becoming fundamentally deranged.

AL, “Erosion as a Menace,” p. 631. In 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt, at a meeting of the American Forestry Association, reportedly declared, in a thunder of emotion, “I am against the man who skins the land.” Greeley, Forests and Men, p. 64. In 1910 Roosevelt declared: “That farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself. I believe the same thing of a nation.” T. Roosevelt, “The New Nationalism,” 1910 campaign speech, http://​www.​edheritage. org/1910/pridocs/1910roosevelt.htm(accessed 18 February 2006).

Ibid.

AL, “Skill in Forestry,” LP, 10–6, 16.

Ibid., p. 1.

Ibid., p. 2.

Ibid., p. 3. Leopold in this draft makes an interesting self-disclosure: “The writer,” he commented, “who has made some pretense at helping to develop the science of wild life management, is keenly aware of an entire absence of ‘natural skill’ in dealing with game animals. What he may know in this field must always be a forced knowledge that can never get more than about so far or so deep. The point is that ‘natural skill’ seems to occur in very small pieces, of which no man ever has very many, and usually only one. Many men are successful and useful foresters without possessing natural skill in anything relating to natural objects. Such men may, however, possess the conservation viewpoint and such organizing ability that their lack of natural skill is offset by their ability to use that possessed by others. I incline to believe that some of the big work in forestry has been done by such men” (p. 4).

AL, “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest,” RMG, p. 88.

Ibid., p. 91.

Ibid., p. 94.

AL, “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest,” RMG, p. 94.

P.D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum: The Third Canon of Thought; a Key to the Enigmas of the World, revised translation by E. Kadloubovsky and the author (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981).

AL, “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest,” RMG, p. 94.

Ibid., p. 95.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 96.

Ibid., p. 94.