Introducing Will Stolzenburg

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Connecting Our Works and Words by Curt Meine

Thank you, friends, for all your interest in the Wild Read project, and for inviting me to participate. It's a fine spring evening now in Wisconsin, with big batches of warblers moving through on migration amid the late-leafing woods.

These days my colleagues and I are traveling a lot with the Green Fire film. I hope that our trails may cross when it comes to be shown near you.

One of the things we've talked about a lot as the film rolls out is how important it is to reach the next generation with the story of our conservation legacy and the message that they too can and must continue to create the land ethic in their own lives. The film really seeks to connect those who already know Leopold, his writing, and his philosophy, with young people who might never have heard of Leopold. More broadly, I'd say, it seeks to provide connection between the past, present, and future of our conservation community. I've always believed that the more deeply we understand the history of our conservation ethic, the better prepared we will be to meet the challenges of the future. And that holds especially for the next generation of citizens and leaders.

We've been surveying those who have viewed the film. When we ask what steps they might take to further the land ethic in their own lives, the most common response we have had is that they intend to go home and read (or re-read) Leopold's A Sand County Almanac. For a writer, there can be no more rewarding words than that! All of us who love books, and the vital ideas and vibrant worlds they reveal to us, belong to what Wallace Stegner called "the great community of recorded human experience," what Leopold called "the thinking community." That community now has a great responsibility: to connect the words and the works, so that our human and natural communities may endure the many gathering crises before us, create a new vision of renewal, and thrive together. Let's keep reading, and let's get to work!

Meanwhile, I'll be checking in as a Wild Reader, and am really looking forward to seeing what Will Stoltzenburg has to share with us.

Beginning May 8th, our discussions on Thinking Like A Mountain and Once and Future Land Ethic will be moderated by author Will Stolzenburg who writes about the science and spirit of saving wild creatures. As a former staff writer for Nature Conservancy magazine, Will has ventured to the far corners of the world to capture stories of the rarest, oddest, most spectacular creations of nature and the people who would save them. Having written hundreds of magazine articles, Will is most recently the author of the book Rat Island: Predators in Paradise and the World’s Greatest Wildlife Rescue, which will be released later this month. His previous book, Where the Wild Things Were, was selected for Barnes and Noble’s Discover Great New Writers series. He is also the screenwriter for the nationally acclaimed documentary Lords of Nature: Living in a Land of Great Predators.

Thinking About Thinking Like A Mountain by Curt Meine

I’m in my office today at the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center, just a mile or so from Aldo Leopold’s iconic “shack” in Wisconsin. We have just concluded our staff meeting, a good portion of which was spent swapping stories about screening our new documentary film Green Fire. Various representatives of the Leopold Foundation have been fanning out to participate in screenings that are occurring across the country (and even overseas). Every place, and every audience, is different. But it is also fascinating to discover the common threads in our conversations.

The title of the film, of course, comes from “Thinking Like A Mountain” and Leopold’s youthful experience in seeing “a fierce green fire” in the eyes of the dying mother wolf that he had shot. In examining Leopold’s life and the continuing evolution of the land ethic, the film explores the history of that particular experience, and of the multiple potential meanings of the phrase. Along the way, we interviewed two special colleagues who remarked upon the phrase “green fire.” Peter Forbes (whom I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this blog) comments in the film: “In that one essay, that one moment when he saw the green fire, that was a transformational moment in his individual life. And it also suggests the transformational moment in our movement if we are willing to change ourselves.” And N. Scott Momaday, the eminent Kiowa writer and poet, remarks: “We all have the essence of the fierce green fire, that’s again our hope.”

My colleague Dr. Stan Temple mentioned in our meeting that, at a recent screening of the film in Idaho, staunch opponents and proponents of wolves were both present in the audience (as, no doubt, were many who are somewhere in the middle). In at least some of the conversations Stan had, the film seemed to provide a bit of a buffer zone in the pitched debate over wolf conservation and management. By illustrating Leopold’s experience with the green fire, we hoped that we could show that these are not simple or purely partisan political issues, but complicated matters of evolving conservation science, ethics, policies, and practice. So my questions for the day: What is the “transformation” and “change” we need to make in the conservation movement? What is the “essence of the green fire”? What meaning do you find in Leopold’s phrase? Is it possible in today's harsh political landscape to find common ground? What will it take?

[Editor's Note: See also the Forest Service's podcasts about the film Green Fire. Steve Dunsky speaks about how Leopold’s vision ties in with the evolving perspective of the Forest Service]

On Dullness and Dynamism by Curt Meine

Karene offered this comment on the previous post:

I have been thinking about this line in Leopold's essay..."We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness." Can you help me understand what he meant by dullness? Also - what should we strive for in our lives/careers to be able to think more like a "mountain"?

That sentence is Leopold at his most drily ironic. He sets us, the readers, up. These things – safety, prosperity, etc. – are, of course, wonderful goals and solid criteria of personal success… until he hits you with that “dullness.” For me, dullness here is a synonym for complacency. The sentence has to be read in connection to the phrase later in the paragraph: that “too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.” It does so, Leopold implies, in the affairs of both people and ecosystems.

An ever-expanding set of studies (most famously in Yellowstone) have documented the phenomenon that Leopold so lyrically described: prey populations and species, in the absence of their predators, can degrade ecosystem function. They do so not only through the raw increase in their numbers, but through changes in their movement and behavior. One of the lessons from Yellowstone and elsewhere is that ungulate populations, in the absence of predators, become more complacent; they become dull. Instead of moving about the landscape, vigilant in the presence of predators, they remain more stationary. The effects reverberate across the ecological community through a series of “trophic cascades.” Bill Ripple and Tom Beschta at Oregon State have studied these phenomena extensively, and coined the phrase “the ecology of fear” to describe these effects. (You might check out the recent documentary Lords of Nature: Life in a Land of Great Predators, which explores these themes. Will Stoltzenburg, who will take over this blog next week, served as the writer for that film.)

So Leopold distilled a lot in his phrase, alluding to the shortcomings of any simplistic measure of success (in conservation and in life); to the need to stay alert, attentive, and alive in the world; and to the utility of fear as a part of our set of inherited evolutionary responses to the world around us.

What should we strive for to be able to think more like a "mountain"? So many answers to that question! We should strive to think large-scale and long-term. We should consider the well-being of the entire system or community, and not just maximizing our short-term, particular interest within it. We should appreciate the limits of simple, linear, cause-and-effect thinking. We should seek to comprehend the dynamic, cascading effects of our choices and decisions on the broader human and natural communities that we exist within.

But above all, there is the point that Leopold was making in the very act of writing the essay: that we should not be afraid to challenge our own premises and evolve in our thinking as we grow though our lives. Leopold did not always strive to think like a mountain. But he challenged his own safe assumptions, warded off potential dullness, and helped to advance conservation in the process!

The Green Fire and the Land Ethic by Curt Meine

Hi friends! My thanks to Anne Post at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's National Conservation Training Center for inviting me to participate in America's WILD READ, and to all of you WILD READERs out there for joining in the conversation! It’s a cool, clear, blustery spring day in south-central Wisconsin, a good day for fresh thoughts.

I’ll start with just a few words of introduction to the two essays. If you are already familiar with Aldo Leopold’s writing, then you have likely read “Thinking Like A Mountain” [from A Sand County Almanac] many times. It’s among his most beloved, haunting, and quoted essays. The wolf-shooting incident he describes took place, we now know, in September 1909, on the Apache National Forest in eastern Arizona (still the Arizona Territory then). He had begun working with the U.S. Forest Service only a few weeks earlier. His first assignment brought him to the Apache, where he was put in charge of a forest reconnaissance crew. It was while working with the crew that the fateful incident occurred. It left little outward mark on Leopold at the time, but plainly the "green fire" in the wolf's eyes had left an enduring impression. Leopold wrote the essay in April 1944. In it he distilled lessons from thirty-five years of experience as a working forester, wildlife ecologist, educator, land manager, hunter, and writer. As an essay it works on many levels, but above all it exemplifies Leopold’s ability to examine critically his own ideas and values, and to grow continually in his capacity as a conservationist.
There is much more to the story that perhaps we can explore through the week. Some of you may have had a chance to see our new documentary film Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time. The essay, and the incident, plays a key role in the film. But more on that later!

The second essay, “The Once and Future Land Ethic" [from Correction Lines: Essays on Land, Leopold, and Conservation] is self-explanatory. I put it together about ten years ago, after a series of events surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. As the essay explains, I tried to ask myself (and others) the hard question:

What will it take to keep the land ethic alive, vital, and growing through the 21^st century?


I haven’t read the essay myself for a while, so perhaps this week will be a good chance to see how on target I was then, and how we may (or may not) have advanced in the decade since. I’ll be very interested in how others view our progress in meeting the challenges it highlights.

I look forward to our exchange, and will try to reply as promptly as a busy spring week in Wisconsin permits!