Aldo Leopold

1887-1948 · American · Environmental Ethics, Conservation Philosophy, Wildlife Ecology, Land-Use Philosophy

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.

In his early years as a Forest Service officer in New Mexico, Aldo Leopold killed wolves. Policy treated predators as enemies of deer herds. Then he watched the green fire die in the eyes of a wolf he had shot and grasped what he called thinking like a mountain: removing wolves unleashes overpopulation, strips the browse, collapses the soil. That conversion — from conqueror to citizen of the land — runs through his work.

Topics Aldo Leopold addresses

• the land ethic
• the biotic community
• thinking like a mountain
• land health
• the ecological conscience
• integrity, stability, and beauty
• the land pyramid
• extension of ethics to land
• land as community not commodity
• the A-B cleavage
• conservation as harmony with land
• predator-prey ecology
• the wolf and the deer
• game management as scientific discipline
• carrying capacity
• wildlife population dynamics
• wilderness preservation
• utilitarian conservation versus preservationism
• the conservation ethic
• land use ethics
• the round river
• rejection of the conqueror role
• aesthetic dimension of conservation
• the ecological education of the citizen

Converse with Aldo Leopold on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Aldo Leopold's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.