Green Fire

>> We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us When we see land as a communit to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

Aldo Leopold.

I do not imply that this philosophy of land is always clear to me.

It is rather the end result of a life journey.

>> Aldo Leopold is considered the most influential conservationist of the 20th century.

His work revolutionized the ideal of the natural world, and our understanding of the ever changing relationship between people and the earth.

For more than three decades, I've been on a journey in search of Leopold and his legacy in our own time.

As Leopold's biographer, I found that Leopold connects people and places across the landscape, from cities and suburbs, to farms and forests and ranches, to our most remote wild lands.

I've explored the people, places, and events that shaped his thinking.

And that led to his greatest idea, the Land Ethic.

>> The land ethic is a result of understanding the interrelationships of the natural system.

It's not something that dad all of a sudden realized.

It took him a lifetime to understand how interrelated we are with the natural system.

Never did we have perspective on this until we all finally grew up.

>> Here, on a once abandoned farm in the sand counties of central Wisconsin, the Leopold family made their own connection to the land.

Since the publication of Leopold's book, "A Sand County Almanac," this place has come to symbolize the effort to build a healthier relationship between people and nature.

And now, all these years later, you get to see people coming from all over the world to visit.

>> For a white pine and a red birch are crowding each other... >> That I love all trees, but I am in love with pines... >> And become scarcer... [reading in foreign language] >> It is an extension of ethics... >> It's astonishing to me and exciting to see how the shack has attracted people.

My father would be absolutely amazed.

>> The amazing thing is after all these years, the interest in Leopold just continues to grow.

Here's this fellow who died in 1948, 60 years ago, and yet he is still read as a contemporary, because his ideas are still not only so current, he's still so far ahead of us.

>> It has taken, you know, 40, 50 or 60 years for us to catch up with the very clear meanings of the words that he was writing, in some cases in the late '20s, certainly through the '30s and the '40s.

>> What I now refer to as the holy trinity are Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Aldo Leopold, as the giants on whose shoulders we stand.

>> We have lost sight of so much magic in the land, spiritual values, so it is time, certainly, to construct or reconstruct an ethic.

>> Even though he used the language, "Land Ethic," he was really talking about an "Earth Ethic."

That earth ethic is as relevant today, more relevant today than it has ever been before.

>> Leopold was a forester and a scientist, a teacher, and a writer.

But above all, he was a careful and deeply curious observer of the natural world.

>> Dad took phenological records.

He was recording the natural events of the season, the first blooming of plants, the arrival of birds, and so forth.

So, here am I, age 91.

Guess what I am doing?

I'm keeping phenological records.

I keep track of about 350 items, which really is one way of monitoring climate change.

It's a very, very critical time.

Keeping phenological records is not only a great sport, but it does give us an idea of monitoring the changes in the climate.

>> Leopold did not know about climate change or the other pressing conservation issues we now face on a global scale.

He did, however, observe firsthand the fundamental changes taking place on the American landscape during his boyhood in the late 1800s.

Railroads were opening the West.

The prairies of the Midwest were being plowed up.

The pine forests of the lake states were being cutover, with the timber floated down river and carried by rail to build the country.

>> Man always kills the thing he loves.

And so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness.

Some say we had to.

Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in.

>> Leopold was born in 1887, here along the Mississippi River in Burlington, Iowa, where the railroad and the river, the two great axes of American development came together.

>> Aldo was raised in this environment here, where there was plenty of opportunity for wandering around and experiencing things, and discovering things.

But that was just half of it.

The other half was that he had parents that pushed him out there, encouraged him to go out there and use that youthful imagination.

>> Aldo Leopold's mother, Clara, encouraged his observational skills, his writing, and his aesthetic sense.

She was a great appreciator of the opera.

It was one of her passions in life.

And because binoculars were not so easily available for bird watching at that point in history, Aldo borrowed her opera glasses.

That was his first set of binoculars.

>> At a very early age, Aldo was out here in the yard, monitoring in his journals, 13 different wren nests in this yard, which is a remarkable thing for an 11 year old.

>> He must've really picked that up from his father, others in the family.

Aldo's father, Carl, he was a conservationist before there was such a thing as a conservation movement.

Carl loved the outdoors.

He loved to hunt.

He loved to fish.

He loved bringing his children into contact with that world.

As Aldo grew up as the oldest son in the family, Carl was the one who really taught him that what you do in the outdoors reflects your set of ethics, your sense of responsibility for the world that you exist in.

It was Carl who helped his son with this ethic that would grow over decades into what we now call the Land Ethic.

So I have not been devoted to telling of Leopold's story simply for its own sake.

I have been most interested in how we can learn from Leopold, how we can take from his story, things that are relevant to the challenges and opportunities of today.

>> Welcome to University of the Air.

>> Our guest is Curt Meine.

>> Thank you so much for having me.

>> When I saw Aldo Leopold's birth date of 1887, it came as sort of a shock, just because he seems such a modern figure.

Tell us about your sense of Leopold and his place in history.

>> The aspect of Leopold that makes him unique in our history is how he connects what's going on now and into the future with the deep origins of conservation and environmental thought.

Now we're moving into a new phase.

We don't know what this next maybe post-environmentalism phase is going to be, or what it's becoming.

But Leopold is still right there in the middle.

>> It think Aldo Leopold is the philosopher who stands between conservation and the modern environmental movement.

>> I think he is perhaps the fundamental guiding light in the development of modern conservation biology.

>> One of the influences for me of Aldo Leopold is realizing that I wanted a life in conservation, more than I was interested in a career in conservation.

So the way it looks for me is living on a piece of land, and caring for that land as best that I and my family can.

>> People who say that they're students of Leopold, or disciples of Leopold, or influenced by Leopold, maybe it's our responsibility to look at the whole Leopold.

>> As Leopold was growing up, the Midwestern landscape was changing dramatically.

Its prairies were being plowed under.

Its forests cut, and its rivers and wetlands transformed by dams, dikes and dredges.

They lived at a time when the water fowl along the Mississippi flyway were being depleted.

Market hunting was still an important force.

There was minimal concern about the decline of wildlife, such as the bison and passenger pigeon, which were headed toward extinction when Leopold was a boy.

>> For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.

>> Aldo Leopold came of age as the conservation movement grew to maturity.

Back then, if you were a young person interested in conservation, there was only one profession you could enter.

And that was forestry.

So, Aldo Leopold was part of that first generation of American foresters.

Many trained at Yale and then went off to work for the U.S. Forest Service, going to places that most of them had never even heard of.

After graduating in 1909, Leopold's assignment was to go to the brand new Apache National Forest in what was then not even a state.

It was still the Arizona Territory.

Well, he takes the railroad out to the Painted Desert in northeastern Arizona.

He gets off at Holbrook, one of the stops along the line, and looks south across the vast expanse of the desert.

He could see a distant line of green on the horizon.

That was the Apache National Forest, created just recently by the signature of Teddy Roosevelt.

Like other foresters, he was starting from the beginning, so he got his proper ranger outfit, and he did have to go buy his own horse.

Aldo Leopold's first real job in the Forest Service was to go out and measure the Apache National Forest.

One of the best known passages of Leopold's writing describes an event that occurred at the very start of his career, when he saw a fierce green fire in the eyes of a dying wolf.

Yet the full meaning of that experience eluded him for many years.

Imagine this.

Aldo is, how old is he?

He's 22.

>> Twenty-two.

>> Twenty-two years old.

Less than two weeks on the job, his first or second free Sunday, he comes out here.

Here's where the green fire started.

It's always struck me as entirely fitting that he started his career in the Forest Service with a moment that he didn't even fully understand.

It would take 35 years for that moment to emerge in his own writing fully.

>> Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf... My own conviction on this score dates from the day I saw a wolf die.

We were eating lunch on the high rim rock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way.

We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent her breast awash in white water.

When she climbed the bank toward us, and shook out her tail, we realized our error.

It was a wolf.

>> As a young forester, Leopold was in a precarious position.

He had to enforce new grazing regulations in communities that had long had unrestricted use of the public lands.

Over the next decade, as Leopold traveled extensively throughout the Southwest, he became deeply interested in the changes that had taken place in the land, especially the impact of severe overgrazing.

>> I mean, we were out here to conquer this country, not to make it better.

I knew nothing about this country, but I had a large family and a small ranch.

And it's self-defense.

I had to figure out a way to grow more grass for the livestock and more wildlife habitat for the wildlife.

I had to figure it out, so I did.

My wife got a book about Leopold, and I began to read about him and see what he did.

I thought, boy, if I'd just read this 30 years ago, I could've saved a lot of time and effort, because he already knew all the things I was learning.

>> Early in his Forest Service career, Leopold began to see the important connections between his work and the health of the land.

He would write to his fellow foresters that, "We are responsible, not just for this or that particular resource.

We are responsible for the well being of the forest as a whole."

That shift in perspective would make all the difference.

>> Our job is to sharpen our tools and make them cut the right way...

The sole measure of our success is the effect which they have on the forest >> Leopold began to realize that the forest environment included soils, waters, plants, and animals.

They were all part of the system.

He was one of the first people to begin to look at the role of fire to protect those southwestern watersheds.

>> The fact that I did burning, and wanted to do more, was a mystery to all my neighbors.

And because I was the new kid on the block, they thought I was just too young and dumb to know any better.

They were scared I was going to set their ranch on fire.

My real objective here would be to get it back to an open savannah, like it was in 1850.

I just kept burning, and people began to see it might work.

>> Leopold's experience in the ranching communities in the Southwest really taught him that you can't solve any conservation problem if you don't address human relationships, as well as human land relationships.

>> There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.

>> He entered a landscape very different from the Midwest.

There were, of course, the many Native tribes, Anglo ranchers from Texas, and Hispanic families that had lived there for centuries.

>> Mother came from a family from Spain that came over with Cortez, and came up through Mexico, and settled in New Mexico, for bigger sheep ranches.

I've often realized that mother's family had a lot to do with the overgrazing of the West.

And here she married dad, the forester, and together, they blended very well.

Mother was teaching school, and dad was a young forester, having just graduated from Yale.

>> He was up in the north part of the state, being very busy as a forest supervisor.

She was living down in Santa Fe.

So he had to write to her letters, and he courted her by mail, basically.

The letters between them are really quite touching.

It was the basis for a lifelong partnership.

>> My dear Estella.

This night is so wonderful that it almost hurts...

I would like to be out in our canyon... and see the wild Clematis in the moonlight.

Wouldn't you?

>> Aldo married into one of the preeminent ranching families in the West.

It gave Leopold a very different appreciation of the cultural dimensions of conservation.

In the long run, it would feed his understanding that conservation is not only about the land's ecological relationships, but also about our own communities and cultures.

Aldo and Estella would eventually have five children, and each one would become a prominent scientist and conservationist in their own right.

The family spent much time together in the outdoors.

These trips were often motivated by Aldo's great love of hunting.

As a young forester, Leopold wanted to increase game populations, but neither he nor anyone else understood the complex relationships connecting predators, prey, people, and forests.

Instead, he acted on the simple premise that fewer predators meant more game.

>> Leopold actually received permission from the Forest Service to travel throughout the Southwest, organizing game protective associations that would work for game protection.

>> So, he was of his generation and time.

To kill a predator was no big deal.

>> I personally believed, at least in 1914, when predator control began, that there could not be too much horned game, and tha the extirpation of predators was a reasonable price to pay for better big game hunting.

>> Due in part to the government's campaign against predators, wolves would eventually disappear from the mountains of the Southwest.

>> In those days, we had never heard of passing up the chance to kill a wolf.

In a second, we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy.

When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide rocks.

>> Leopold wrote "Thinking Like a Mountain" many years after the wolf shooting incident occurred.

The essay is, in many ways, about the ability to change our ideas.

>> Later in his career, Leopold began to realize that deer could be very destructive to the forest if their numbers increased.

So Leopold himself recommended the removal of bounties on wolves.

One of the most successful areas in which he began to pursue his ideas was the Gila National Forest.

As deer populations increased there, he began to go into the Gila with horses and pack stock on long hunting trips.

He began to realize that there was potential for developing a new kind of recreational experience in the forests, what he called wilderness hunting grounds.

>> Wilderness is the one kind of playground which mankind cannot build to order...

I contrived to get the Gila headwaters withdrawn as a wilderness area to be kept as pack country, free from additional roads, forever.

>> Roads were spreading across the country, threatening the last great wild areas.

So he began working to protect the larger expanses of undeveloped land in the Southwest.

This led to the designation of the Gila Wilderness Area on the Gila Forest in 1924.

It was the first federally designated wilderness area, 40 years before Congress passed the Wilderness Act.

Leopold championed our remote wild lands, but he understood that wildness can be found anywhere, even in our largest cities.

>> We're gonna grow some carrots.

Is everybody ready?

>> Yeah.

>> These seeds are very small.

I want you to put one or two of those seeds in the holes, okay?

Yes, in there for me.

This is 3-1/2 acres here.

>> It wasn't always as pretty as it is now?

>> Oh, no.

Its history was a 35-year-old illegal dump site.

The community actually called it Dead Man's Alley, because a few dead bodies had been dumped here in those 35 years.

So, basically, there's so many things taking place in a former illegal dump site, you'll be amazed.

We have a prairie.

We have a wetland.

We have a children's petting zoo.

We have a Potawatomi Indian village.

And we've got garden over here teaching people how to grow food.

It's amazing what you can do in these little bitty spaces, trying to reconnect this community back to the land.

>> The land ethic, this idea that we're part of a community includes the land and the land includes us.

It doesn't matter where you are.

It doesn't matter if you're in the most remote wild place or if you're in the heart of a big city like Chicago.

It doesn't matter where you are.

>> It doesn't matter.

Nature is here.

It's everywhere to be found.

We've got to really change the mindset of so many people, especially in urban environments that are so disconnected from the land.

I had the biggest argument with a student, who argued with me where the eggs in our hen house came from.

I was showing him Henrietta, our chicken layer, and he was saying, she didn't lay that egg.

"That egg came from Jewels."

I said, "You mean the grocery store?"

He said, "Yeah, that's where it came from, the grocery store."

I said, "Where do you think the grocery store got it from?"

Then he thought about it and he said, "It came from the grocery store."

[laughs] >> There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm.

One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from a furnace.

>> In the late spring of 1924, Leopold made a major career move.

He returned to the upper Midwest, to Madison, Wisconsin, where he accepted a new position as Assistant Director of the Forest Products Laboratory.

After several years, Leopold left the Forest Service to devote himself to his most compelling interest, wildlife.

For three years, he conducted unprecedented surveys of game populations and habitats across the Midwestern states.

Then, in 1933, he published the first text in the new field, "Game Management," and became its first professor at the University of Wisconsin, where he would help develop this new idea of ecological restoration at the Arboretum.

>> It's always amazing to me, that he could look into the future without having a lot of role models to follow.

He had this vision that we could rebuild on this site, prairies, savannahs and forests that were here, and rebuild them the way they were before European settlement.

They went out and foraged over the landscape and found small remnant prairies, collected sods, collected seeds, collected plants, and brought them here and established the species that used to be there.

>> If a land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not... To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

>> My father was head of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum in the '30s.

I think he was enjoying that process so much that he decided he wanted to do it on his own land.

That's when he got this property.

>> On this sand farm in Wisconsin, first worn out and then abandoned by our bigger and better society, we try to rebuild, with shovel and axe, what we are losing elsewhere.

It is here that we seek, and still find, our meat from God.

>> I remember dad at dinner one evening said that he had bought some land up in the sand counties along the Wisconsin River.

We all had dreams of a little cabin covered in vines, where we would sit on the porch and watch the water.

Not so.

We finally got in to see this place, and it was corn stubble and cockle burrs as far as you could see.

The old shed that remained was the old chicken coop.

It was waist deep in frozen manure.

>> Our first task was to get rid of the manure that had accumulated in this little shed that was the only building left standing after the house burned down.

>> There were no windows.

There was just an opening for the door.

I say my mother was a saint.

She said, "Oh, okay, all right..." But as soon as we started fixing it up, we all became addicted.

We just loved it.

>> When my husband found this little place, which was a worn out farm, he decided to buy it to see what could be done.

>> The shack was as close to nothing as you could get, and still it was everything.

It's where we learned to work.

Where we learned to be together, and to sing, and it just pulled the family together.

It was seven us, and the dog, and usually a pet or two.

It was quite a cheerful place.

>> There's one thing that my husband always said, and which we kept to, "Never take anything up there that isn't absolutely necessary."

>> We always had the guitar.

There was always a gun, the picnic basket, the dog.

The essentials.

I think fundamental to everything was this absolutely wonderful marriage between my mother and my father.

>> You haven't any idea how much pleasure I have gotten out of going into the country with my husband.

>> It seemed to me that that was one of the happiest marriages I know of.

He'd say, "Your mother and I are going to the shack for the weekend.

Anybody want to come?"

And of course, we all wanted to come.

Now, I look at is as kind of a metaphor of how one can find absolute happiness with the least amount of stuff.

>> Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them.

Now we face the question whether a still higher standard of living is worth its costs in things natural, wild and free.

>> When Leopold came out to his shack by the Wisconsin River, there were no calls of sandhill cranes.

He had to go deep into the sand counties, into the wilderness areas to find the last few birds that were left.

He estimated that there were only about 100 cranes in Wisconsin.

And the whooping crane was practically extinct then.

He thought his "Marshland Elegy" was an elegy to the sandhill crane that would soon disappear.

>> When we hear his call, we hear no mere bird.

We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution.

He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.

>> In the midst of the Depression and the Dust Bowl, Leopold was rethinking our very idea of progress, and how it affects the land.

>> The destruction of soil is the most fundamental kind of economic loss which the human race can suffer.

>> The upper Midwest was subject to massive soil erosion and watershed degradation.

So Leopold and a team of like-minded colleagues pioneered a radical new approach to conservation, working with all the landowners in a given watershed to heal the land.

The first time they tried this was in western Wisconsin, in a place called Coon Valley.

Here in this little valley, a revolution in conservation began.

Hundreds of farmers joined the effort, working with specialists in agriculture, soil, water, wildlife and forestry.

With the newly enrolled young workers of the Civilian Conservation Corps, together they created the very first watershed scale conservation project in the nation.

We tend to think of something as either public or it's private, and there's no overlap between them.

>> Leopold started on the public land, the national forest lands, and so on.

But then, he came to realize the importance after moving back to the Midwest, that there really was very little public land.

In fact, most of the productive land from a biological standpoint is really on private lands and not on public lands.

So, out of that came the idea that if we really are going to protect and preserve our environment, we would have to do it through private land and private land owners.

>> Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest >> So, Leopold came in with the idea that we ought to have a beautiful landscape, not just a utilitarian landscape.

He wrote back then about conservation being harmony between people and land.

And land to him was more than just soil.

It also includes water, and wildlife, and plants, and humans.

Just drive through Coon Valley today and see the beauty of the landscape.

Through Leopold's ideas and many others who began back in 1933, we've been able to make that land much healthier again.

>> In 1935, Leopold's interest in forestry and wildlife conservation drew him overseas for the only time in his life.

On a trip to Germany, he got a firsthand look at intensive resource management.

>> We Americans have not yet experienced a bear-less, wolf-less, eagle-less, cat-less woods.

Germany strove for maximum yields of both timber and game, and got neither.

>> Leopold's time in the forests of central Europe taught him a critical lesson.

Germany had, over several centuries developed an artificial, highly intensive approach to forest and game management.

But for Leopold, something crucial was missing.

>> He made a trip in 1935 to Germany, where he describes the slick, clean forests.

One of the contrasts of that was his trip in 1936, and again in 1937, to the Rio Gavilan region of northern Mexico, a region that I have become familiar with in my own work.

This is a pretty wild, remote piece of country.

I think it had a profound influence on Leopold.

>> It was here that I first clearly realized that land is an organism, that all my life I had seen only sick land, whereas here was a biota still in perfect aboriginal health.

The term "unspoiled wilderness" took on a new meaning.

>> We are all Aldo Leopold's great-grandchildren intellectually, and I happen to be personally, as well.

But he's pointed us down an important path.

And we'll be going down that path and finding our way for some time, I suspect.

That's a good thing.

>> Leopold's travels led him to realize that wilderness must be protected, not just for its recreational and cultural values, but also for its scientific value.

In his words, we need wilderness to serve as a land laboratory, a place to understand the land's ecological processes.

During this period, Leopold joined forces with other leading conservationists to form the Wilderness Society, dedicated to protecting the wildest portions of the nation's public lands from rampant development.

Eventually, the system of protected wilderness would embrace more than 100 million acres across the country.

>> To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.

>> While Leopold fought to protect the spectacular public wild lands, he was equally conscious of the need to restore wildness and land health close to home.

>> What more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and by cautious experimentation to prove how it works.

What more substantial service to conservation than to practice it on one's own land?

>> That first year, we began to plant pines and to bring it back to what it was originally.

>> We planted 3,000 a year, so I think it was approximately 48,000, something like that, all together.

>> Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how.

To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a good shovel.

>> Leopold's thinking is pertinent everywhere.

It was very modern with regards of using science and the new emergent science of ecology for making decisions about managing the landscape.

>> It took ecology to bring us back to this notion of communities, of things being deeply connected.

Leopold was the key translator of that idea.

>> I think today, Aldo Leopold's influence and his philosophies are more apparent, and more of a guiding factor in land management agencies than they've ever been.

>> Our tools are better than we are.

They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides, but they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history, to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.

>> This is an area where wolves have been reintroduced.

In an ongoing process, there have been about 100 wolves reintroduced over the years, and about 52 at last count, occupying this country and the adjacent country over in New Mexico.

We've got a ways to go in terms of building our wolf numbers up to what we refer to as ecologically effective population density.

This population was down to seven wolves at one time.

Every Mexican wolf that's alive today in captivity or the wild can be traced back to seven animals, so they were teetering on the brink of extinction.

It was nearly there.

Starting when the wolves were taken out of that system, the aspens, willows and the cottonwoods just ceased to reproduce, because the elk increased in numbers.

That's one of the roles of wolves in ecosystems, is to control the elk population.

It's an amazing story of ecological regeneration.

Wolf recovery, of course, is an extremely controversial topic.

So we need to find new ways to resolve conflict that leave more wolves on the ground.

So we can get to that objective and help regenerate ecosystems.

>> Conservation, without a keen realization of its vital conflicts, fails to rate as authentic human drama.

It falls to the level of a mere utopian dream.

>> Leopold understood that these are complicated issues.

He understood that there were no simple solutions.

He himself contained so many different dimensions.

He was a hunter.

He was also a protector of wildlife.

He was a forester who understood the need for "wise use" of timber, and other forest resources.

But he was also one of the great champions of preserving wild lands.

All the complex tensions that were built into the conservation movement were there inside Leopold.

>> The amazing thing is that we could almost be seeing a wolf here any time, because they're back.

>> And they are nearby, aren't they?

>> Yes, they are.

There is a pack about five miles from here.

That's close in wolf terms.

That means they could be anywhere near us at this point in time.

>> We may never know exactly where the wolf shooting incident happened, but we can feel pretty confident that it was very close to where we're standing.

For the record, it's almost exactly 100 years ago to the day that the incident happened here.

>> That's correct, in September.

>> So he and his ranger, Mr. Wheatley, are both shooting, presumably, we don't know which fatal shots may have been whose.

But the wolves are wounded, a couple are down.

The ones that are surviving begin clawing their way back into the talus slopes, Leopold comes up to the mother wolf, and sees the green fire die right here.

>> We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.

I realized then and have known ever since that there was something new to me in those eyes, something known only to her and to the mountain.

I was young then and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise.

But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

>> In that one essay, that one moment when he saw the green fire, that was a transformational moment in his individual life.

It also suggests the transformational moment in our movement, if we're willing to change ourselves.

>> You know, we all have the essence of the fierce green fire.

That's again, our hope, I think.

>> The fierce green fire Leopold saw in the eyes of the dying wolf would come over his lifetime to signify far more than one creature's passing or one person's experience.

Remembering that fateful moment, Leopold bore witness to the deep history of the mountain, the fullness of its community of life, the complicated and changing role of people within it.

For Leopold, the encounter with the wolf was an early turning point on his own trail.

He followed that trail until it led to the Land Ethic.

Finally, in the summer of 1947, he sat down to distill his thoughts.

>> Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.

It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

>> The Land Ethic was the end result of a long process of experience and reflection.

In many ways, it was the culmination of his life journey.

These are Leopold's field journals.

He began them in 1917, when he was still in the Forest Service and living in the Southwest.

These aren't his professional journals.

These are his more personal records of his own time in the outdoors.

And almost any time Leopold was outside, the next thing he would do was come home and write about it.

On any given day, he'd note the weather, what he saw, phenology, first and last blooms of flowers.

This is just two nights before he would pass away, actually.

In fact, over here we have things that were on him when he suffered the heart attack that killed him while he was fighting a fire.

This is actually materials that were in his pocket that were singed during the fire.

This is actually the final entry in Aldo Leopold's field journals.

April 21, 1948.

Bloodroot in Shower Bed, Closed, 6:00am.

>> My father was at the shack with mother, always.

My younger sister, Estella, she was about 15 years old then.

>> So, that week, we got all packed up, just mother and dad and I went up to the shack to plant pines.

And of course, that was the very week when the neighbor's fire was a calamity for us.

>> The farmer adjacent to us was burning brush.

The fire got away from him.

So dad and mother and Estella decided they would go and help this farmer fight the fire.

Each one went in a different direction.

All of a sudden, I guess the fire was out, but dad was nowhere to be seen.

>> I went out into the marsh.

I saw a man coming down the hill, coming toward me.

I had this sinking feeling.

He came all the way across the marsh, and when he got to me, I said, "Something's wrong."

And he said, "Yes, your father's sick."

I said, "It's worse than that, isn't it?"

I just knew.

>> We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.

I realized then and have known ever since that there was something new to me in those eyes... >> It was fortuitous, indeed, that the same week that dad died, he heard from Oxford University Press that they would publish his essay.

>> After several rejections, "A Sand County Almanac" was finally published.

At first, it sold modestly.

It took decades for it to become as some would say, "the Bible of the environmental movement."

It would sell in the millions.

>> His writing was so deep, and so layered, that you can find something new each time you pick it up.

>> Now I read it at least once a year on my birthday, just to see what I've learned.

>> Even in Russian, it's, you feel the poetry.

>> That book is an absolute masterpiece.

It's so simple, but that's only the construction, because the thinking behind it is so, so deep.

>> I had the pleasure of reading this book, "A Sand County Almanac," about 25 years ago.

I'm pleased to be with you this morning.

Thank you for the honor.

We're going to share the reading of "February."

If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while... >> I remember one day I was at the shack with Estella Leopold and her mother on Easter Sunday, 1969.

We heard a sound that was unlike anything I had ever heard.

It was an extraordinary thrill.

You know, I had never heard that sound before in my life.

But somehow, I had heard it in my imagination, because Leopold had described it as this primordial bugling.

The sandhill cranes had come back to Aldo Leopold's marsh.

>> Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.

It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.

The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words.

>> Thanks to Leopold, and to so many who have followed him, sandhill cranes have rebounded dramatically.

Although we face daunting threats to nature's diversity worldwide, the cranes demonstrate and symbolize our ability to work together for the health of the land and its creatures.

Leopold's legacy endures, because he is asking the fundamental questions of our relationship to the earth, to other forms of life, to the communities in which we live.

>> There's been a rediscovery of Leopold's significance for community-based conservation.

More than a million organizations all over the world are working on some aspect of conservation and restoration of the environment.

This, I've come to believe, is a veritable green fire of conservation and ecosystem restoration.

That, I think, is Aldo Leopold's living legacy.

>> Leopold said that the oldest task in human history is perhaps to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.

Certainly, my generation is no better than the one before us.

But I think there's a lot of hope in the land ethic.

A land ethic is not meant to be a last word.

It's not meant to be doctoring.

It's really a guiding light for the way we can find our way forward.

>> If you read "The Land Ethic," you'll see what I like to call Leopold's most important sentence.

Toward the end of "The Land Ethic," he has a sentence that says, "Nothing so important as an ethic is ever written.

It evolves in the minds of a thinking community."

So here he is, in his essay, "The Land Ethic," saying no one writes the land ethic.

I think it's a stroke of genius, maybe his greatest stroke of genius, because with that, he liberates the idea.

He opens it to the larger thinking community.

Us.

>> I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution, because nothing so important as an ethic is ever written.

It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.

Aldo Leopold.

>> To learn more about Aldo Leopold, or to purchase your own copy of Green Fire, or Leopold's classic, "A Sand County Almanac," please visit: www.aldoleopold.org Offer made by the Aldo Leopold Foundation, Baraboo, Wisconsin.