Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold viewed the wolf as an animal to be hunted when he was young. At one moment in time, Leopold shot a wolf and watched it die.1 He saw the life leave the animal and watched the spirit fade from the wolf’s eyes. This and a career spent supporting conservation in the American Southwest and as a leader with the US Forest Products Laboratory in Madison led Leopold to change his view about predators, including the wolf, and their impact on game populations.2 Leopold felt it was important to manage habitat to provide a large supply of big game animals.3 In this vain, Leopold was financed by the Sporting Arms & Ammunition Manufacturer’s Institute to conduct game surveys of north-central states, including Wisconsin. 4 This survey led to Leopold discovering that deer populations suffered as wolf populations declined. This ran counter to his prior held belief that since the wolf was a predator of the deer, the wolf should be heavily controlled to protect the health of the deer population. He discovered that as the wolf population declined, the coyote population began to kill many more young deer, devastating the deer population, whereas the wolf fed on adult deer which didn’t hurt the deer population nearly as much as the coyote did.5 As a result, Leopold began to focus on species he once thought needed to be extinguished, species like the wolf, committing to preservation of threatened species.6 He began to see that a habitat required diversity in order to bring about healthy numbers of game populations. Flader put it this way, “A proper function of management, it now became apparent to him [Leopold], was to encourage the greatest possible diversity in an attempt to preserve the widest possible realm in which natural processes might seek their own equilibrium.”7 Leopold began to understand the wolf as the apex of the food chain and that man was arrogant in thinking he should kill off the wolf to shorten the food chain.8 Leopold wrote in his concept of diversity of species in his essay, “A Biotic View of Land.” Flader pointed out that, “The key idea in this essay was Leopold’s assumption that there was a definite relationship between the complex structure and the smooth functioning of the whole- between the evolution of ecological diversity and the capacity of the land organism for self-renewal, which he termed stability or land health.”9 The wolf had become Leopold’s symbol of land health.10 Leopold had progressed in his view of the wolf, first believing that the animal should be hunted heavily to manage other game populations, then realizing that nature must strike its own balance. Leopold recognized that it takes time to understand the complexity of the wilderness, saying “Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.”11

1. Susan Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), 1.
2. Flader, “Thinking,” 16-18.
3 Flader, “Thinking,” 21.
4 Flader, “Thinking,” 21.
5 Flader, “Thinking,” 93-95.
6 Flader, “Thinking,”29.
7 Flader, “Thinking,” 30.
8 Flader, “Thinking,” 2.
9 Flader, “Thinking,” 31.
10 Flader, “Thinking,” 2.
11 Flader, “Thinking,” 1.