Well, who knows what's in another's heart? The more important point you make
is that Leopold possibly felt unable to express his opposition to official
policy (sound familiar?). I have seen that in young USFS rangers who say
that once they get their years in and they can't be fired, then they will
act on changing the policy. Unfortunately, events have proven over and over
that by the time the individual has those years in, he has internalized the
official policy and it is no longer in his interest to rock the boat.
Maybe the same applied in Aldo's case and he was able to overcome
his reticence.
-Tc
Anthony R. S. Chiaviello, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Professional Writing
Department of English
University of Houston-Downtown
One Main Street
Houston, TX 77002-0001
713.221.8520 / 713.868.3979
"Question Reality"
> ----------
> From: Steven Bissell[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2001 12:44 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: green fire
>
> 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
>
