Unnatural Ethics

Dear Green-Fire Lighters:

For the past week or so I’ve been musing over the writings of Aldo Leopold, the great naturalist whose vision of environmental ethics were collected in 1949 into the posthumously published A Sand County Almanac. As a young man, Leopold longed to attend the Yale School of Forestry, founded by Yale University in 1901 as a graduate program in forest management. Eventually receiving his master’s degree in 1909, Aldo was able to turn his love for the outdoors into a full-time career. 

At that time, however, it was believed that saving nature required altering it. Heavily influenced by intrepid hunters like Teddy Roosevelt, the model of conservancy dominated, which meant manipulating the environment to maximize the proliferation of game. In the National Parks where Leopold worked, he was required to eliminate wolves perceived to be invasive hunters competing with the human predators who were increasing their appetite for deer. Having shot one of the last wolves on a particular mountain slope, Leopold watched “the fierce green fire dying in her eyes” and realized neither the wolf nor the mountain deserved this.

Leopold observed:

I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddle horn … In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers … So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the change. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence, we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea. (Sand County Almanac, Oxford University Press, p.121)  

Leopold was responsible for a wilderness ethic summarized in his admonition to think like a mountain—to see nature as a big picture which recognized a land ethic. Leopold wrote, “All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively the land.”

The influence of Leopold’s writing is credited with the eventual re-introduction of wolves into Yellowstone, an event recalled by then Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt:

In January 1995 I helped carry the first grey wolf into Yellowstone, where they had been eradicated by federal predator control policy only six decades earlier. Looking through the crates into her eyes, I reflected on how Aldo Leopold once took part in that policy, then eloquently challenged it. By illuminating for us how wolves play a critical role in the whole of creation, he expressed the ethic and the laws which would reintroduce them nearly a half-century after his death. (Biography of Aldo Leopold by Maribeth Lorbiecki, A Fierce Green Fire, Oxford University Press, 1999, back cover)

My land ethic musings have been triggered by our recent national obsession with eliminating difference from our social landscape. All recognition of interdependence is being jettisoned in defense of an American conforming individualism stripped of all influence and nuance provided by our many strands of history, culture and identity. We are told it is for our own good, because encouraging diversity is said to be diluting our strength. So, in the name of superior dominance and homogeneous vigor, we have welcomed unethical behavior to “purify” the land. It concerns me how this strategy, when tried in the wild, resulted in its devastation. I fear the consequences when it is applied to a whole society; neither the wolves nor the nation deserves this.

Thinking nature still has things to teach us, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor