Mark Your Maps: Aldo Leopold Weekend in Wisconsin

Mark Your Maps: Aldo Leopold Weekend in Wisconsin

Mark Your Maps …

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

For all you avid map-readers out there, this quote appears in Aldo Leopold's book, A Sand County Almanac (ASCA, p. 294), first published in 1949. The quote explains Leopold’s view that the wilderness in "the blank place on the map" has immense value even if humans have no roads into it, no ways to extract products or recreational pleasure from it and no lines in the ledger signifying its economic value.  If Leopold were asked, “When a tree falls in the wilderness and there is no one to hear it, will there be a sound?,” he would give a resounding, “YES!”  And he would probably point to a blank place on a Wisconsin map to show you where the tree fell.

Courtesy of the Aldo Leopold Foundation,
www.aldoleopold.org

Aldo Leopold was a wildlife manager, forester, professor and author of the book, A Sand County Almanac.  In it, he conveys the idea of a land ethic in which we humans need to act as responsible members of our biotic communities and manage our ecosystems for the long haul and not just for short-term gain.  Over two million copies of this book have been sold and it's considered one of the finest environmental books ever written.

To honor Leopold’s life and work, each year the state of Wisconsin celebrates (by decree) the Aldo Leopold Weekend during the first full weekend in March.  This year, there will be low-key celebrations at the Aldo Leopold Center in Baraboo, Wisconsin and elsewhere (for events, click here) March 7-8 2015. Activities may include readings from A Sand County Almanac, screenings of the film “Green Fire,” Dutch oven cooking workshops and Aldo Leopold Bench Building workshops (for potential activities click here).  

…But Would You Please Stay On The Path?

If you don’t mind a quick look down this side path with me, Aldo Leopold was concerned about the impact of people, including our roads and recreational activities, on wilderness areas.  He wrote, "Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the … human mind.” (ASCA p. 295.)  He recommended saving examples of different types of wilderness areas for a variety of purposes, including for low-impact recreation, for scientific study, and for use by wildlife.

Photo of A Sand County Almanac and Wisconsin Recreation Atlas

A recent article in the New York Times takes this idea further, describing the subtle and not-so-subtle harm that people do to animals simply by engaging in recreational activities in wild areas. Wolverines near ski resorts waste precious energy in winter avoiding skiers; birds avoid 100 meters on each side (!) of hiking and cycling paths and rear fewer young as a result; and opening an area in Connecticut to hiking caused a wood turtle species to vanish within 10 years. The article states that the solution may be to restrict human activity to certain times of the day or to certain parts of a natural area in order to best allow animals to live and rear their young.

While wildlife managers are working out their recommendations for making minimal impacts on wildlife, it makes sense when you’re out in nature to control your pets (maybe leashing Lassie?), to pack out what you pack in and to stay on the trail so the wild animals and plants can thrive instead of merely survive.  For ideas on how to help make your outdoor activities low-impact, check the online L.L. Beans guide or the helpful  Wisconsin DNR site.

All Cooped Up in Here

Here’s a little more about naturalist and conservationist Aldo Leopold, who was born in Burlington, Iowa in 1887.  Leopold was an outdoors enthusiast and during his lifetime enjoyed hunting, fishing, journaling, sketching and bird watching.  He graduated from the Yale School of Forestry in 1909 and was hired as one of the first foresters in the U.S. Forest Service, working in Arizona and New Mexico.  He was instrumental in getting the first wilderness area, the Gila Wilderness Area in NM, designated as such in 1924.  In 1933, he published the first book on game management ever written and he became the first chair in game management in the U.S. at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

In his personal life, Leopold married Estella Bergere and they had five children, Starker, Luna, Nina, Carl and Estella. In 1935, the Leopolds bought, as a vacation property, an abandoned farm with a burned-down house and worn-out soil in Baraboo, Wisconsin.  They turned the old chicken coop into their living quarters, which they called the Shack and, over the years, planted tens of thousands of trees and worked to restore the prairies. Aldo Leopold carefully recorded the resulting changes to the land and wildlife over the years in his many notebooks. What looked like a crazy investment in a run-down farm became a long-term ecological restoration project that shaped many of Leopold's ideas about land conservation.  Below, you can see a photo of the Shack and a copy of the Leopold-style bench, which you might be lucky enough to build at an Aldo Leopold Weekend event.

Courtesy of the Aldo Leopold Foundation,
www.aldoleopold.org 

Leopold was a prolific writer and in the 1940’s, he wrote A Sand County Almanac to get his message about land conservation out to the public.  Although it was rejected by a number of publishers, it was finally accepted for publication by Oxford University Press in late February of 1948.  In March of that year, Leopold died of a heart attack while helping a neighbor fight a fire near the Shack property.  In case you’re wondering about Leopold’s five children, they all grew up to follow in their father’s footsteps, working in the natural sciences and conservation. (For more information click here.)

In 2007, the Aldo Leopold Foundation opened a center to help it fulfill its mission to “foster the land ethic through the legacy of Aldo Leopold.” The center is  platinum LEED-certified  building and was built on the Leopolds' Baraboo property using trees planted years earlier by the family. Today, we would say this was built in a sustainable manner, although Leopold might have said it was built with a land ethic in mind.   

Land Conservation: the Ultimate MMP Collaborative Game

Leopold described the land ethic like this, “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively: the land. (ASCA , p. 239)  He went on to say that because we humans are part of a larger ecological community, we have an obligation to use and maintain the land wisely.  “A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.” (ASCA, p. 258) 

Courtesy of the Aldo Leopold Foundation,
www.aldoleopold.org

A land ethic includes avoiding use of resources as stakes in a zero sum game where the winner takes all at the expense of the environment. Regarding environmental resources, business as usual is like playing Monopoly, where there is only one winner left at the end of the game and he or she owns most of the resources.  Business using the land ethic is more like playing Pandemic, where the players all win if they can work collaboratively to find a solution to the problem at hand.  We could even say that natural resource management is the ultimate, massively multi-player (MMP), collaborative game where we all win if we can just work it out.

The solution to ecological problems, according to Leopold, is for individuals and governments to use their ecological conscience to make correct decisions about conservation.  Because it's so difficult to assign an economic value to species of songbirds or wildflowers, for example, such decisions should not be based on solely on their economic worth.  Each species is part of a biotic community and the community as a whole may not survive if separated from its parts of supposedly low economic value. Decisions made using an ecological conscience and keeping the land ethic in mind are better because, "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." (ASCA p. 262)

Happy Trails to You!

I hope you find a way to celebrate the Aldo Leopold Weekend coming up March 7-8, 2015. Borrowing  A Sand County Almanac from your local library and reading it would be one way to participate.  Putting up a bird feeder and watching the birds or taking a long walk in a natural setting near you would be another.  Happy Trails to you!  

Notes and Resources

1)  The abbreviation “ASCA” refers to the book, A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold and the page numbers to the paperback edition published by Ballantine Books in New York in September of 1970.
2) The Wisconsin Recreation Atlas is published by National Geographic and was last updated in 2012.
3)  Environmental problems are quite complex and can’t be easily modeled with a simple board game like Monopoly or Pandemic.  However, the cooperative environment management game Okolopoly does a pretty good job of modeling this complexity.  It was produced in the 1980's in Germany as a board game and also in an online version. 
4) Note I've stopped just short of calling ecological resource management an MMPRPG because no roles are taken.