Abstract
In conjunction with his June 1939 talk, “A Biotic View of Land,” before the joint meeting of the Ecological Society of America and the Society of American Foresters, Leopold sent a copy of the address to a respected friend and frequent correspondent, P. S. Lovejoy, asking for a critique. Lovejoy, an Illinois native three years Leopold’s senior—once a fellow forester and for twelve years chief of the Michigan Conservation Department’s Game and Fur Division—wrote frequently about broad-reaching land-use issues. Like Leopold, Lovejoy had an ecological mind that was quick to see interconnections on the land. With a firm imagination, he used a quirky vernacular in his letters, which Leopold termed “Lovejoyiana” and which, for the uninitiated, sometimes required translation.
The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words.
Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
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Notes
- 1.
See AL, “Obituary: P. S. Lovejoy,” Journal of Wildlife Management 7, no. 1a
(1943): 125–128.
- 2.
P. S. Lovejoy, letter to AL, 12 July 1939, p. 1,UWDWE.
- 3.
Ibid., p. 7.
- 4.
AL, "A Biotic View of Land," RMG, p. 270.
- 5.
P. S. Lovejoy, letter to AL, 12 July 1939, p. 7.
- 6.
In ecological science, holists and reductionists have been perhaps most commonly
distinguished by whether or not they understand the whole (a community
or ecosystem, for instance) to be equal to more than the sum of its parts, that is, to have emergent properties. Scientists who recognize emergent properties, in turn, may divide the properties into those that arise out of scientific ignorance, so that the trait disappears upon further study of the parts, and those that are truly and inherently not reducible to parts, so that the characteristic must be examined at the appropriate unit level. Differences among ecologists come largely from their position with regard to reduction- ism, holism, and emergence. See R. P. McIntosh, The Background of Ecology: Concept and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). P. S. Lovejoy in letters to Leopold referred several times to the work of social- insect ecologist William Morton Wheeler’s "emergent evolution" thesis: Lovejoy wrote that Wheeler said, in Emergent Evolution and the Development of Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1928), "that no amount of study as to ‘steam ‘or’ water, ‘will pre-determine the properties of ‘ice’ … & mebby likewise as genes get shuffled etc. [we cannot predict outcomes of interactions of parts just by knowing something of the parts]." See, for example, P. S. Lovejoy, letters to AL, 10 May 1941 and 4 August 1941, UWDWE. I have not been able to find a response of Leopold’s to this particular idea. Leopold assigned to his wildlife ecology class readings on ecological social organization that included a number of works by University of Chicago social ecologist W. C. Allee on the "evolution of communities," including Allee’s Animal Life and Social Growth (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1932) and Animal Aggregations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931). See also AL, "Of Mice and Men," p. 5, LP 10-6, 16.
- 7.
P. S. Lovejoy, letter to AL, 7 January 1937, UWDWE.
- 8.
AL, "A Biotic View of Land," RMG, p. 271.
- 9.
AL, "The Farmer as a Conservationist," FHL, pp. 164-165.
- 10.
AL, "Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest," RMG, p. 94.
- 11.
For example, see comments to Leopold on his draft of "Skill in Forestry," UWDWE.
- 12.
AL, "The State of the Profession," Journal of Wildlife Management 4, no. 3 (July 1940): 343-346; RMG, p. 276.
- 13.
Ibid.
- 14.
Ibid., pp. 276-277.
- 15.
Ibid., p. 277.
- 16.
AL, "The Role of Wildlife in a Liberal Education," RMG, pp. 302-303.
- 17.
P. S. Lovejoy, letter to AL, 10 May 1941, p. 3, UWDWE. Lovejoy was writing to Leopold about a phrase the latter had used in his 1940 "Wisconsin Wildlife Chronology" (Wisconsin Conservation Bulletin5, no. 11:8-20): "Each [trivial event in the following chronology of wildlife events] marks the birth or death of an aspiration, the beginning or the end of an experience, a loss or a gain in the vitality of that great organism: Wisconsin." Lovejoy apparently didn't believe that this was Leopold at his finest.
- 18.
Albert Hochbaum, letter to AL, 4 February 1944, LP 10-2, 3.
- 19.
AL, letter to Albert Hochbaum, 1 March 1944, LP 10-2, 3.
- 20.
P. S. Lovejoy, letter to AL, 31 October 1940, UWDWE: "I still like the Gavilan job very well . . . & I make another bow for you."
- 21.
Albert Hochbaum, letter to AL, 22 January 1944, LP 10-2, 3.
- 22.
Albert Hochbaum, letter to AL, 4 February 1944, LP 10-2, 3.
- 23.
Albert Hochbaum, letter to AL, 11March 1944, LP 10-2, 3.
- 24.
AL, “Request for Information on Existing and Needed Reserves of Natural Conditions” for the Sierra Madre, submitted to C. Kendeigh of the Ecological Society of America Committee for the Study of Plant and Animal Communities, ca. 1941, LP 10-3, 10.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
AL, RR, pp. 131–132.
- 27.
AL, “Song of the Gavilan,” Journal of Wildlife Management 4, no. 3 (July 1940): 343–346; also in SCA, p. 149.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 152.
- 29.
Ibid., pp. 151–152.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 151.
- 31.
Ibid., pp. 152–153.
- 32.
Ibid., pp. 153–154.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 154.
- 34.
AL, “The State of the Profession,” RMG, p. 276.
- 35.
This was Leopold’s spelling.
- 36.
AL, “The Thick-Billed Parrot in Chihuahua,” Condor 39, no. 1 (January– February 1937): 74–75; also in SCA (as “Guacamaja”), pp. 137–141.
- 37.
AL, “Guacamaja,” p. 140.
- 38.
While abundant on the Mexico side, this species appeared only on the hypothesis list of the 1931AmericanOrnithologists’Union checklist for the U.S. side of the Sierra Madre (partly because of Leopold’s careful identification and reporting of the bird), wandering only occasionally across the border in search of mast; LP 10-3,10. See also F. Bailey, Birds of New Mexico
(Santa Fe: New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, 1928), pp. 306–307. The thick-billed parrot appeared not at all in J. L. Peters’ Check-List of Birds of the World.
- 39.
AL, “Guacamaja,” p. 138.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 137.
- 41.
Ibid., p. 138.
- 42.
“Numenon” was Leopold’s spelling. The word is taken from 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). It is like inmeaning to “numen”: “a spiritual force or influence often identified with a natural object, phenomenon, or locality” (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, 1976) and “noumenon”: “a ground of phenomena that according to Kant cannot be experienced, can be known to exist, but to which no properties can be intelligibly ascribed.” Scattered throughout Leopold’s writings are indications that Leopold continued to think of Ouspensky’s work and perhaps returned to it from time to time. Although most entries in his personal journal are undated, it is likely that his first entry from Ouspensky was written sometime in the early tomid-1920s: “The aim of art is the search for beauty, just as the aim of religion is the search for God and truth. And exactly as art stops, so religion stops as soon as it ceases the search for God and truth, thinking it has found them” (AL, personal journal, p. 22).What Ouspensky conveyed in the remainder of the text from which this passage is quoted was similar to Leopold’s urge to break down “senseless barriers.” Science, art, religion, and philosophy were all different approaches to the same end of gaining knowledge about the world, the truest of which was to discover the inner qualities of things. “Science,” Ouspensky had written, should be an “investigation of the unknown” (p. 99).But in getting to the essences of things, religion and art had an upper hand. And it somehow seemed that it was in the seeking, as opposed to the finding, that a person came closest to truth and beauty. Ouspensky,Tertium Organum, pp. 193–194.More than forty pages after the first reference to Ouspensky in Leopold’s pocket-sized journal, indicating a passage of some time (though probably still recorded in the mid- to late 1920s), are two more small quotes from Ouspensky: “But life belongs not alone to separate, individual organisms—anything indivisible is a living being,” and “All cultural conquests in the realm of the material are double-edged, may equally serve for good or for evil. A change of consciousness can alone be a guarantee of the surcease of misuses of the powers given by culture, and only thus will culture cease to be a ‘growth of barbarity.’”AL, personal journal, p. 69. See also AL, “Land Pathology,” 15 April 1935, p. 1, LP 10-6, 16, in which he wrote “Ouspensky” in the margin next to the paragraph beginning “Philosophers have long since claimed that society is an organism.”
- 43.
Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, p. 146.
- 44.
AL, “Introduction,” unpublished notes, LP 10-6, 16. Isaiah: “ . . . upon the cedars of Lebanon that are high and lifted up, and upon all the oaks of Bashan”; David: “The trees of the Lord are full of sap”; John Muir: “Every cell is in a swirl of enjoyment, humming like a hive, singing the old-new song of creation.”Leopold wrote, “An even more impelling reason [than pest control
for desiring a diverse landscape, composed as far as possible of native species] is that we like it. This liking is not economic; it is compounded of ecology and poetry.”
- 45.
For instance, see T. Roosevelt, “Nature Fakers,” Everybody’s Magazine 17, no. 3 (September 1907): 427–430. The controversy is considered in detail in R. H. Lutts, The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science, and Sentiment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990). See R.Nash, “Aldo Leopold’s Intellectual Heritage,” in J. B. Callicott, ed., Companion to “A Sand County Almanac”: Interpretive and Critical Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 63–90.
- 46.
AL, personal journal, p. 28, LP 10-7, 1 (15). See J. Burroughs, Whitman: A Study (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896).
- 47.
AL, “Dear Judge Botts,” unpublished, n.d., LP 10-6, 16.
- 48.
AL, “January Thaw,” SCA, p. 4.
- 49.
Ibid. Resonances with FDR’s “Four Freedoms Speech” to Congress 1/6/41
- 50.
AL, “Great Possessions,” SCA, pp. 41–42; “Pines above Snow,” SCA, p. 87.
- 51.
AL, “Axe-in-Hand,” SCA, p. 70.
- 52.
AL, “Marshland Elegy,” American Forests 43, no. 10 (October 1937): 472–474; also in SCA, p. 101.
- 53.
AL, “The Choral Copse,” SCA, p. 53.
- 54.
AL, “The Green Pasture,” SCA, p. 51.
- 55.
AL, “Thoughts on a Map of Liberia,” unpublished, n.d., LP 10-6, 16. This draft was a precursor to “The River of the Mother of God,” RMG, pp. 123–127.
- 56.
See Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, pp. 11, 21, 51–52, 93–94. Ouspensky drew from C. H. Hinton’s The Fourth Dimension (London, S. Sonnenschein, 1904), which had to do with the spatial perception of humans and, more broadly, with how humans might enhance their apprehension of the world.
- 57.
AL, “Thoughts on a Map of Liberia.”
- 58.
AL, “The River of the Mother of God,” RMG, p. 127. This manuscript was written in the early 1920s and submitted to and rejected by the Yale Review.
- 59.
See AL, “Flambeau,” SCA, pp. 112–116.
- 60.
AL, “Ecology, Philosophy, and Conservation,” ca. late 1930s, p. 1, LP 10-6, 16. Truth, suggested Ouspensky, putting it another way, could be expressed only in the form of a paradox. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, p. 226.
- 61.
AL, “Ecology, Philosophy, and Conservation,” p. 1.
- 62.
AL, review of A.E. Parkins and J.R.Whitaker, eds., Our National Resources and Their Conservation (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1936), in Bird-Lore 39, no. 1 (January–February 1937): 74–75.
- 63.
AL, "The Wilderness and Its Place in Forest Recreational Policy," Journal of Forestry 19, no. 7 (November 1921): 7I8-721; also in RMG, p. 79. Leopold, it seems, had turned a phrase from A. T. Hadley's Some Influences in Modern Philosophic Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1913): "That which will prevail in the long run," Hadley had written, "must be right" (p. 129). Hadley distilled this philosophy in a lecture included in this book, titled "Politics and Ethics": "The criterion which shows whether a thing is right or wrong is its permanence. Survival is not merely the characteristic of right; it is the test of right" (p. 71 ).
- 64.
AL, “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest,” RMG, p. 96.
- 65.
The influence of Ouspensky and Hadley on Leopold has been noted and discussed in B.G.Norton, “The Constancy of Leopold’s Land Ethic,” Conservation Biology 2, no. 1 (1988): 93–102; B.G.Norton, personal communication, 2004.
- 66.
AL, "Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest," RMG, p. 97. In an unpublished and undated draft titled "Ecology, Economics, and Land Use" (LP 10-6, 16) Leopold makes an effort to reason through his conservation viewpoint, noting that the assumption that the biota was all built for humans is "an arrogance hardly compatible with the theory of evolution" and that respect for the value of the biota as a whole "probably precludes an ethical society from exterminating its constituent parts. It certainly precludes their needless extermination. Conservation is respect for biotic values."
- 67.
Ibid. See also J. Burroughs, Accepting the Universe (NY: Russell & Russell, 1920), pp. 35–36.
- 68.
Ibid.
- 69.
AL, “Marshland Elegy,” SCA, pp. 95–96.
- 70.
Ibid., p. 96.
- 71.
AL, “The Land Ethic,” SCA, p. 216.
- 72.
Land community membership gave species a "right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state" (AL, "The Community Concept," SCA, p. 204; see also AL, "Substitutes for a Land Ethic," SCA, p. 210). "[B]irds" and other creatures "should continue as a matter of biotic right, regardless of the presence or absence of economic advantage to us" ("Substitutes for a Land Ethic," SCA, p. 211). "We should have been better off to assert, in the first place, that good and bad are attributes of numbers, not of species; that hawks and owls are members of the native fauna, and as such are entitled to share the land with us; that no man has the moral right to kill them except when sustaining injury" (AL, "What Is a Weed?" RMG, p. 309, FHL, p. 212). "We have no right to exterminate any species of wildlife. I stand on this as a fundamental principle" (AL, "Deer, Wolves, Foxes, and Pheasants," Wisconsin Conservation Bulletin 10, no. 5 [1945]: 4). "Mr. Hayden concludes, I think rightly, that the only sure foundation for wildlife conservation is 'the right of things to exist for their own sake'" (AL, "Review of S. S. Hayden, The International Protection of Wildlife," in Geographical Review 33, no. 2 [April 1943]: 341). "Soil built the flora and fauna and was in turn rebuilt by them. Conservation must consider the biota as a whole, not as separate parts." Second, "Man must assume that the biota has value in and of itself, separate from its value as human habitat" (AL, "Ecology and Economics in Land Use," unpublished, n.d., LP 10-6,16)
- 73.
AL, “To the Forest Officers of the Carson,” RMG, p. 44.
- 74.
See AL, “The Erosion Cycle in the Southwest,” unpublished manuscript, ca. 1935 (including notes with slides by the same title for “Erosion Symposium,” dated 17December 1935), p. 1, LP, 10-6, 12.
- 75.
AL, "A Hunter's Notes on Doves in the Rio Grande Valley," Condor23, no. 1 (January-February 1921): 19-21; also in ALSW, p. 96.
- 76.
AL, “The State of the Profession,” RMG, p. 280.
- 77.
AL, “Goose Music,” RR, p. 171.
- 78.
AL, “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest,” RMG, p. 96.
- 79.
AL, “Goose Music,” RR, p. 171.
- 80.
C. D. Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 65.
- 81.
The final sentences of AL, "The Forestry of the Prophets," Journal of Forestry 18, no. 4 (April 1920): 412-419 (also in RMG, p. 77), were as follows: "In closing, it may not be improper to add a word on the intensely interesting reading on a multitude of subjects to be found in the Old Testament. As Stevenson said about one of Hazlitt's essays, 'It is so good that there should be a tax levied on all who have not read it.'" In his personal journal (p. 7) AL copied down these lines: " If I were appointed a committee of one to regulate the much debated question of college entrance examinations in English, I should . . . erase every list of books that has been thus far suggested, and I should confine the examination wholly to the Authorized Version of the Bible.—Wm. Lyon Phelps.” See Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 64.
- 82.
AL, personal journal, pp. 36–42.
- 83.
A. T. Hadley, Baccalaureate Addresses: And Other Talks on Kindred Themes (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907), p. 91.
- 84.
Nina Leopold Bradley, Leopold's elder daughter, personal communication, 2003 .
- 85.
Leopold used this line from Shakespeare's Hamlet (Act IV, scene 7) a number of times: "For goodness, growing like a pleurisy, / Dies in his own too much"; see, e.g., AL, "Conservation Economics," RMG, p. 196, and AL, "Wilderness," RMG, p. 229.
- 86.
AL, personal journal, p. 46. The poem, by Louis Untermeyer, was published in the July 1919 Yale Review.
- 87.
AL, personal journal, p. 26.
- 88.
AL, “Clandeboye,” SCA, p. 160.
- 89.
Ibid.
- 90.
Ibid., p. 161.
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Warren, J.L. (2016). Ecological Poetry. In: Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey, Tenth Anniversary Edition. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-754-4_8
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