[This summer, my older son is extending his prior efforts to help combat climate change by interning with the amazing Climate Just Cities project. That project is part of the long legacy of American environmental activism, so this week I’ll highlight a handful of such activisms. Leading up to a special weekend post on Climate Just Cities!]
On three important
environmental concepts to which the pioneering
conservationist connects.
1)
Forestry at Yale: In
1900, when Leopold was just 13 years old, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Division
of Forestry director Gifford
Pinchot donated money to Yale to start the nation’s first
dedicated graduate forestry school. That program became young Leopold’s
dream destination, and after a series of necessary steps (including attending preparatory
school in New Jersey and completing undergraduate requirements at New Haven’s Sheffield Scientific
School) he made it to Yale, and went on to be the poster boy for this new
type of academic conservationism. This was the era when many
scholarly disciplines were becoming more organized around academic study,
but of course the very idea that forestry was a scholarly discipline was
likewise new, and a vital part of Leopold’s own career and arc.
2)
Game
Management: Another longstanding conservationist idea that transformed into
a scholarly discipline in the course of Leopold’s lifetime was wildlife management.
And indeed, in this case Leopold was a pioneering figure in that
transformation, as his 1933 appointment as Professor of Game Management
in the University of Wisconsin’s Agricultural Economics Department (itself the first such specialized department in the
world) made him the first such professor in the nation. Long ago I wrote for my
Talking Points Memo column about the interconnections between big game
hunting and American history, and would note that the creation of such positions
and departments reflects an even more important shift when we locate them
within that larger collective context.
3)
An Ecological Conscience: Those kinds of
communal programs and disciplines provide important contexts for Leopold’s
career, and indeed were likewise influenced by him. But ironically, it’s in a
text published just after his 1948 death that Leopold’s own most influential
ideas were developed. Leopold spent the last decades of his life living in
central Wisconsin’s so-called sand county (or sand
prairie), an area that had been over-logged and -farmed, devastated by
fires, and left largely barren by the mid-20th century. Throughout
his time there Leopold was working on the book that he completed not long
before passing and that was published in 1949 as A
Sand County Almanac. The whole book explores Leopold’s “Land Ethic” (as
he termed it), but the section entitled “The
Ecological Conscience” most directly expresses what he means: “In short, a
land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from the conqueror of the
land-community to plain member and citizen of it.” That’s an environmental
perspective we could still much better hear and learn from.
Next environmental
activism tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? American environmental voices or efforts you’d highlight?
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