Abstract
The legacy of racism, inequity, and injustice in the history of conservation and the contemporary environmental movement is being scrutinized as never before. The American ecologist, conservationist, and author Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) is among the influential historical figures whose attitudes and actions have been sharply criticized. Especially because Leopold was devoted to protecting wildlands and expressed concern about the impacts of human population growth, detractors have characterized him as callously misanthropic at best, racist and fascistic at worst. These representations can be weighed against Leopold’s personal and professional record, and his views on such themes as the Native American experience, the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, cultural diversity, and the rise of fascism. In his late years, and in the final formulation of his influential essay “The Land Ethic,” Leopold was increasingly explicit in framing his value system as one grounded in a commitment to just human relations. Moreover, the ethic he expressed was not static and could not be exclusionary. It expanded the purview of ethical consideration in the conservation movement and provided new foundations for the expansion of environmental awareness in the mainstream of American society. Viewed in this way, Leopold may be regarded not as an apotheosis of conservation thinking, but as an essential transitional figure within a still broader, ongoing movement, informed by an ever-evolving ethic of care.
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Notes
Baldwin’s essay first appeared as “Letter from a region of my mind” in the November 17, 1962 issue of The New Yorker, pp.59–144.
Lopez delivered these remarks on April 23, 2017, in the 1st Annual Leopold Lecture at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico. I am grateful to Dr. Pricilla Solis Ybarra for sharing her recording of Lopez’ lecture. Lopez died on December 25, 2020, as this essay was being prepared. Lopez’ work informs this discussion in so many ways, and I honor his life and words.
Earlier discussions of race, class, gender, and diversity in the history of the conservation and environmental movements include Melosi 1980; Fox 1981; Rydell 1987; Gottlieb 1993b; Hurley 1995; Melosi 1995; Merchant 1995; Catton 1997; Judd 1997; Warren 1997; Spence 1999; Merchant 2003; and White 2004.
Taylor 2016 provides an essential historical overview. Jacoby 2014 details exclusionary practices behind the establishment of parklands. Spears (2019) provides a more intersectional history of the environmental movement. Nijhuis 2021a is a compact overview of the history of wildlife and biodiversity conservation. Among other recent commentaries, see Purdy 2015; Santana 2019; NoiseCat 2019; Amend 2020; and Colman 2021.
Commentaries on the legacy of John Muir are compiled in “Sierra Club vs. John Muir,” John Muir Global Network, https://johnmuir.org/sierra-club-vs-john-muir/. See, for example, Moreno 2020; Worster 2020; Robbins and Moore 2021; Mair et al. 2021; and Nijuis 2021b. On Theodore Roosevelt, see McGreevy 2020; Gessner 2020; and Washington Post 2021. Lanham 2021a considers the legacy of John James Audubon.
See Andrews 2019; Braun 2020; Gatheru 2020; Kashwan 2020; Nocco et al. 2021. These posts and publications draw directly or apparently indirectly on Powell 2015 and Powell 2016. However, the characterization of Leopold as a racist and ecofascist is not new. To cite one example, Lepine (1993) regarded Leopold as a “Nazi” and “racist” who “rejected the sanctity of life and… scorned human beings.” See Meine 2004, p. 179.
For the purposes of this article, and in the absence of specific journal style recommendations, I have opted to use the term Native American, while cognizant of the inadequacy of that terminology in different contexts and circumstances.
The historian’s term for this tendency is presentism, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a bias toward the present or present-day attitudes, esp. in the interpretation of history” (https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/266885). For several decades, presentism has been an active theme of debate among academic historians (e.g., Hunt 2002; Wilson 2019).
This passage appears in Leopold’s 1993a, b article “The Conservation Ethic,” first published in the Journal of Forestry. Lin (2020a, pp. 10–11) notes, the article “was reprinted in 1946 under the title ‘Racial Wisdom and Conservation’ in [the] Journal of Heredity. Leopold’s conservation ethic was introduced in the preamble as providing an ecological basis for eugenics. How the article came to be republished here is unclear. There is no evidence that Leopold was aware of or acceded to this use of his article.”.
For a compendium of commentaries on the forthcoming centenary of the Gila Wilderness Area, see Allen 2022.
In “The Land Ethic” in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold changed “pioneering philosophy” to “our current philosophy” (p. 220).
The literature on this point is, of course, vast. Research and commentary on the relative impact of human population growth on the environment remains active and unsettled, as evidenced in recent articles, e.g., de Sherbinin et al. 2007; Weber and Sciubba 2018; Crist et al. 2017; and Nasrollahi et al. 2020.
Several volumes of Leopold’s collected writings are available: Flader and Callicott 1991; Brown and Carmony 1990; Callicott and Freyfogle 1999; Meine 2013; and Meunier and Meine 2018. In addition, the Aldo Leopold Archives at the University of Wisconsin-Madison hold the vast majority of documentary materials related to Leopold. The collection is digitized and available for readers and researchers at https://search.library.wisc.edu/digital/AAldoLeopold.
One youthful encounter did evidently leave a strong (if naïve) impression on Leopold. As a seventeen-year-old he had the opportunity to attend a lecture by Charles Eastman (Ohíye S’a), the prominent Santee Dakota (Isáŋyathi) physician, writer, and reformer. “Some words and phrases which I have never heard anywhere else impressed me particularly,” Leopold wrote to his mother. “He said, after speaking of the Indian’s knowledge of nature, ‘Nature is the gate to the Great Mystery.’ The words are simple enough, but the meaning unfathomable” (Meine 2013, p. 705).
See also Lorbiecki 2016, pp. 178–183, 194–201.
Hine, the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in zoology at the University of Wisconsin, remained a close friend of the Leopold family, and credited Leopold’s writing with “[having] had more of an effect on me than anything in my thinking.”
It is possible that Leopold favored accepting only men as students in the immediate postwar rush of student applications under the G.I. Bill.
See n. 7 above. Gatheru (2020) includes Leopold alongside Madison Grant and John Muir as “white supremacists that created the language of conservation to accommodate racialized conceptions of nature.” Braun (2020) similarly places Leopold in the company of William T. Hornaday in maintaining a “casual racism against Native peoples.” Nocco et al. (2021) regard Leopold as an “ecofascist” with an “exclusionary legac[y].”.
Aldo Leopold to W. Redmond Cross, 15 December 1930, UW Archives, Aldo Leopold papers, Series 9/25/10–2: Organizations, Committees.
A cursory review of Leopold’s archival papers does not provide any indication that Leopold was aware of the anthropologist Franz Boas, who countered the eugenicists’ racist pseudoscience. See King 2019.
Luna offered similar remarks, refuting the charge of ecofascism, in his foreword to McCabe 1987: “Rather than interpreting the concept of the land ethic as an indication of disregard for the individual in favor of the species or the ecosystem, my view is quite different. I see the concept of the land ethic as the outgrowth and extension of his deep personal concern for the individual. Accepting the idea that the cooperations and competitions in human society are eased and facilitated by concern for others, he saw that the same consideration extended to other parts of the ecosystem would tend to add integrity, beauty and stability to the whole.” See also Kobylecky 2015.
See n. 2 above.
Warren continues: “Unlike Leopold, I went on to develop a different position, ecofeminism, which explores important connections between the domination of women, people of color, children, the poor, Third World and indigenous peoples, and the domination of nonhuman nature. Unlike Leopold, I went on to argue that an environmental ethic which fails in theory or practice to reflect ecofeminist insights into the nature of these connections is inadequate. Still, it was Leopold’s description of land as property and his association of land with ‘slave-girls’ which first inspired me to think not only about ‘an ethic, ecologically’ but about the gendering of human-nonhuman relationships.”.
Whyte (2015) notes that such comparisons “can be considered important today because they are a potential option for bringing together environmentalists of all heritages in North America based on a common ethical orientation.” As noted above Whyte also cautions, critically, that “any potential comparison” necessarily entails “sobering acknowledgment of and openness to differences between Leopoldian and Indigenist ethics.” See also Hausdoerffer (2015).
Kimmerer writes: “The next step in our cultural evolution, if we are to persist as a species on this beautiful planet, is to expand our protocols for gratitude to the living Earth. Gratitude is most powerful as a response to the Earth because it provides an opening to reciprocity, to the act of giving back.” See also Nelson and Shilling 2018.
Savoy’s book chapter as a whole constitutes a response to her question. She writes: “The scope of America’s thinking community’ remains narrow. A democratic dream of individual liberties and rights hasn’t yet contributed to a ‘co-ordinated whole’—whether human, biotic, or the land. Danger lies in equating theory with practice, or ideal with committed action, as personal responsibility and respect for others, and for the land, can be lost to lip service, disingenuous manners, and legislated gestures to an ideal.”.
In addition to references included above, a sample of recent literature at the intersection of land, history, conservation, ethics, identity, cultural diversity, and social justice includes Berry 2010; Cole and Foster 2001; Finney 2014; Forbes 2011; Francis 2009; Kimmerer 2013a, b; Lanham 2016; Lanham 2021b; Middleton 2011; Moore and Nelson 2010; Nabhan 1997; Peña 2005; Penniman 2018; Savoy 2016; Deming and Savoy 2002; Wakild 2011, and White 2018. More theoretical approaches can be found, for example, in Pretty et al 2009; Rozzi et al. 2013; Sikor et al. 2014; Martin et al. 2016; and Meyfroidt et al. 2022.
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Acknowledgements
I write from the ancestral homelands of the Hoocąk (Ho-Chunk Nation) and am deeply grateful to the many members of the Nation who have informed the content of this article, especially Rhonda Funmaker, Jon Greendeer, William Quackenbush, Melanie Tallmadge Sainz, Samantha Greendeer Skenadore, Elena Terry, and Kristin WhiteEagle. Likewise I am grateful to all the other tribal communities and First Nations in what is now the State of Wisconsin (and beyond). Although I am solely responsible for the views expressed in this essay, I am indebted to many colleagues for their careful and constructive comments during its development, especially Steve Brower, J. Baird Callicott, John Hausdoerffer, Buddy Huffaker, Alanna Koshollek, Rick Knight, Jennifer Kobylecky, Patrice Kohl, J. Drew Lanham, Roberta Millstein, Gary Paul Nabhan, Michael Paul Nelson, Ufuk Özdağ, Qi Feng Lin, Eduardo Santana Castellón, Daniel Schneider, Dan Shilling, Stan Temple, Tim Van Deelen, and Priscilla Solis Ybarra. I would be remiss in not acknowledging so many friends and colleagues who have also contributed through countless conversations and communications over many years. Although too many to mention, I am especially mindful and appreciative of George Archibald, Ernie Atencio, Jeb Barzen, Rich Beilfuss, Fikret Berkes, Wendell Berry, Kim Blaeser, Jessie Conaway, David Blockstein, Peter Brown, William Cronon, John de Graaf, Alison Deming, Steve and Ann Dunsky, Sharon Dunwoody, Jane Elder, Ron and Joan Engel, Susan Flader, Peter Forbes, John Francis, Eric Freyfogle, Wendell Gilgert, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, Francesca Grifo, John Grim, David Groenfeldt, Katy Gwiazdon, Amelia and Michael Howard, Mac Hunter, Wes Jackson, Paul and Pat Johnson, Robin Kimmerer, Heather Knight, Richard Kyte, Jeannette Leehr, Patty Loew, Carolyn Merchant, James Edwards Mills, N. Scott Momaday, Kathleen Dean Moore, Laurie Monti, Milford Muskett, Michelle Nijhuis, Brian Norton, Rob Nurre, Riki Ott, Harry Peterson, Anna Pidgeon, Randy Poelma, Volker Radeloff, Jeannine Richards, Adena Rissman, Carl Safina, Jack Selzwedel, Lauret Savoy, Michelle Stevens, Gopi Sundar, Bron Taylor, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Alberto Vargas, Laura Dassow Walls, Julianne Warren, Courtney White, Kyle Whyte, Gabriela Zaldumbide, members of the Leopold family, and my colleagues at the Aldo Leopold Foundation, the Center for Humans and Nature, and the International Crane Foundation. I am indebted as well to Dr. Wei-Ning Xiang for his encouragement and constructive criticism in the development of this commentary. Two anonymous reviewers provided invaluable feedback. A previous, condensed version of this article was posted January 2, 2021, online on “The Conversation” website: https://theconversation.com/in-a-time-of-social-and-environmental-crisis-aldo-leopolds-call-for-a-land-ethic-is-still-relevant-147968.
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No funding was received to assist with the preparation of this manuscript. The submitted work was self-funded, prepared solely by the author as an independent scholar. The author is affiliated with, and partially supported by, the Aldo Leopold Foundation, the Center for Humans and Nature, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. These institutions placed no restrictions, nor offered any specific guidance, on the content of this perspective essay.
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Meine, C. Land, ethics, justice, and Aldo Leopold. Socio Ecol Pract Res 4, 167–187 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42532-022-00117-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42532-022-00117-7