Scratchings-and-Sniffings

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Aldo Leopold Posted: 21 Sep 2009 04:26 AM PDT When I was a freshman wildlife biology student at the University of Montana the first book on the reading list was A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. Leopold is the father of the modern conservation movement and he has special ties to my part of the country going back 100 years. Fresh out of the Yale school of Forestry at the age of 24, Leopold was dispatched to the newly created US Forest Service in New Mexico and Arizona. Here he began a career that would change land use principles and game management thinking for ever.    As a young forester, Leopold practiced what he was taught. Trees were not much more than potential "board feet" to be managed to maximize harvest and predators like mountain lions, and wolves were to be exterminated to protect cows and so that elk and deer populations would thrive.   Through observation and experience, his thinking began to change. He saw first hand the effects of unregulated grazing on sensitive riparian areas. He saw how overgrazing could lead to severe erosion. He witnessed the effects of deer and elk population explosions in a predator free environment. His thinking changed.   He began to think like a mountain as he put it. He saw that everything was connected in the web of life and that natural systems work in a delicate balance easily thrown off kilter by the hand of man.   "Just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of wolves, so does a mountain live in fear of its deer," he wrote.   This simple sentence recognizes that unchecked populations of herbivores can wreak havoc on an ecosystem by overgrazing. When deer or elk or cows for that matter, mow down the young cottonwood shoots along a stream bank there is less shade and the banks are less stable. The river water heats up and the stream banks erode. Hotter water and heavier silt loads make the streams uninhabitable for native fish like trout. Extinction ensues.   In 1921, Aldo Leopold wrote a plan for he management of the headwaters of the Gila River creating the Gila River Forest Reserve. In 1924, this area became the Gila Wilderness; the first officially designated wilderness area in the US. Leopold had the foresight to recognize that large tracts of land had to be preserved to keep ecosystems intact and they had to be managed to limit human activities. Hunting and fishing are allowed along with hiking and horseback trips, but no motorized vehicles and no roads.   Leopold's vision lead to the creation of the National Wilderness Preservation System in 1964. Today, we are fortunate to have 756 designated wilderness areas encompassing over 109 million acres in 44 states and Puerto Rico. These are places where we can go today to escape the hectic pace of the modern world. It gives us a chance to step back and see the natural world in a more natural state, the way our ancestors may have seen it. These areas are working laboratories where the connections between plants, animals, insects, water and soil are undisturbed and functioning as well as can be expected. They are a national treasure that all americans should work to protect and expand.   This weekend we celebrate the Gila River Festival and 100 Years of Aldo Leopold's legacy in the Southwest. Two of my close friends are reading from books they have written about the Legacy of Aldo Leopold. One of them, Phil, is the fire lookout owner of Alice, the luckiest dog in the world. Phil and I have embarked on the joyous task of exploring every nook and cranny of the Black Range. We've seen most of it and later this fall we'll see the one part we have not visited yet.   It's a fitting tribute to the man that changed resource management for the better. In 1980, Congress designated 202,016 acres of the Black Range as The Aldo Leopold Wilderness Area.

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