Anthony wrote:
The moment was after shooting a she-wolf amid a pack of juveniles, from some
distance; Leopold goes down and checks on his kill to find the wolf near
death, but not quite dead: this fierce greenness was still evident in the
wolf's eyes and went slowly out, fading and losing its color. He was so
affected by the experience that he immediately questioned the program of
wolf extermination and shortly became an advocate of "balance," which as we
have already discussed, has been supplanted by a notion of dynamism in
natural processes.
Bissell here: Actually the incident of shooting the wolf took place early in
Leopold's career. He states that it was from this point that he began to
question predator control, but he actually still endorsed it for several
decades. Along with the perceived need to control wild fire, this was an
issue that Leopold took a long time to change his initial ideas, or at least
to publicly express them. This could have been a political decision on
Leopold's part, both predator control and fire suppression were (and to some
extent still are) sacred cows in the US Forest Service, Dept. of
Agriculture, and US Fish and Wildlife Service.
I suppose there is something to the idea that SCA was Leopold's attempt to
put all his most radical ideas into one format. I think that it's
interesting that Leopold is still a figure of mixed feelings in the US
Forest Service. A couple of years ago I saw, in print, the statement from a
senior Forest Service administrator that Leopold's "ideas were like herpes;
impossible to get rid of.
Steven
“Our human ecology is that of a rare species of mammal in a social,
omnivorous niche. Our demography is one of a slow-breeding, large,
intelligent primate. To shatter our population structure, to become abundant
in the way of rodents, not only destroys our ecological relations with the
rest of nature, it sets the stage for our mass insanity.”
Paul Shepard
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