Leopold's Shack and Ricketts's Lab: The Emergence of Environmentalism
216
Leopold's Shack and Ricketts's Lab: The Emergence of Environmentalism
216Hardcover(First Edition)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520264786 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2010 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 216 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.60(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d) |
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Leopold's Shack and Ricketts's Lab
The Emergence of Environmentalism
By Michael J. Lannoo
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2010 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-26478-6
CHAPTER 1
Out of the Midwest
Leopold and Ricketts shared a midwestern upbringing. Rand Aldo Leopold was born on January 11, 1887, in Burlington, Iowa, to first cousins Carl and Clara Leopold. Aldo was the eldest of four Leopold children; Marie was born in 1888, Carl Jr. in 1892, and Frederic in 1895. His father began his career as a traveling salesman, selling barbed wire to western ranchers, before settling down to run the Rand and Leopold Desk Company. And although "Carl had hardly ever used a desk, much less built one," he was "a businessman of the highest integrity. His approach was as simple as it was risky: he wanted to build the best desk that he could, and if he could make a profit at it, so much the better." The company made roll-top desks constructed of cherry, oak, and walnut, known for their enduring quality. The company's motto, emblazoned on its stationery, was "Built on Honor to Endure."
Edward Flanders Robb Ricketts was born on May 14, 1897, in Chicago, Illinois, to Abbott and Alice Ricketts. Ed was the eldest of the three Ricketts children; his sister, Frances, was born in 1899, his brother, Thayer, in 1902. His father made a modest income as an accountant and a salesman. In her journal Frances noted, "most of their paternal relatives were ministers, while many in their mother's family were storekeepers. Not a really poor person on either side ... I wonder what is the matter with our branch of the family in this generation?"
Both Leopold and Ricketts showed early the promise of the men they would become. Young Aldo was "a precocious student, interested in many things, and good at most everything he was interested in." Leopold's interest in the natural world reflected his family's activities, and growing up along the Mississippi River and its waterfowl flyway gave him every opportunity to explore and, later, hunt. Curt Meine writes, "The early observer atop Burlington's bluffs gained an eyelevel view of one of the most spectacular wildlife displays the continent has ever offered. The hunter in the marshes below gained one of its most promising shots."
In order to provide relief for the hay fever that Aldo's mother suffered, every August the Leopold family traveled to the north end of Lake Huron, spending six weeks or so on Les Cheneaux Islands. It was "land rich in the raw material of adventure, and wild enough to inspire the imagination." Aldo's youngest brother, Frederic, recalled, "In our young minds, we imagined that we were at the jumping off place where to the north an endless wilderness extended to Hudson Bay and the arctic."
In high school, Aldo was introduced to the "disciplined natural science that he would eventually make his life's work." In the process he honed his considerable artistic ability by making detailed maps and anatomical drawings. From his English teacher, Miss Rogers, he learned a deep appreciation for the written word. Leopold also developed an interest in forestry, and at the time the only school of forestry in the country was at Yale University. In 1904 he shipped off to Lawrenceville Preparatory School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, where he spent an academic year and a half laying the foundation for an Ivy League education, although he noted, "The instruction in English and History is much inferior to that of the [Burlington] High School."
Ed Ricketts was "from birth, a child of intelligence and rare charm.... He began speaking very young and began using whole but simple sentences before he was a year old." His family lived in a rough section of Chicago, and their worried mother sheltered them. His sister wrote, "We spent hours at home in pre-school days with our noses pressed against the window pane looking out." Under these conditions all the Ricketts children became enthusiastic readers. As Ed recalled much later, in a letter to Harcourt, Brace, "At the age of six, I was ruined for any ordinary activities when an uncle who should have known better gave me some natural history curios and an old zoology textbook. Here I saw for the first time those magical and incorrect words 'coral insects.'"
Ricketts's parents were devout Episcopalians, and Ed was a choirboy. When he was ten, his father accepted a job in Mitchell, South Dakota, and moved the family there. They stayed only a year before moving back to Chicago, but for young Ed it was a crucial year. He spent his time outdoors and "collected and studied birds, insects and every other form of life he encountered."
In school, Ricketts was known as "the walking dictionary." Though not athletic, he was strong and compact, "hardening himself" by taking cold morning "plunges" and exercising in the evenings. His sister Frances wrote, "By the time he was 11 or 12 he also slept outdoors on the ground in our back yard much of the time rolled in blankets, without 'even a tent,' until winter.... It was part of his program to sleep out, even during storms. Our parents were pleased when they were able to bribe him to sleep indoors during the coldest weather." In high school, Ed enjoyed and excelled in both science and humanities courses, and began making the cross-disciplinary connections that would characterize his thinking for the rest of his life.
Despite these similarities, there were deep personality differences between the two youths. Leopold was shy, especially when it came to interacting with girls; among his closest companions were the family dogs. In high school "Aldo remained solitary in his ways, not antisocial, not social." His brother, Frederic, noted, "He did not think he was cut from common cloth, and he wasn't." In contrast, Ricketts was outgoing and charming; people were drawn to him. "Revered among his friends as a talker—some called him the Buddha or the Mandarin, both because of his habit of sitting cross-legged on his bed, quietly nodding and smiling in response to whatever nonsense was going on in the room at the time, and when he spoke his words were wise." Women were attracted to him, and he was attracted to women. Ricketts always thought of himself as a common man, and several of his later associates were bums and prostitutes (Ricketts's motives with these women were not related to their profession, and he did not "befriend" them through the usual method of transaction fees).
Leopold and Ricketts attended first-rate universities, but as with their personalities, college life could not have been more different for the two young men. In September 1905, Leopold began his studies at Yale. In 1900 an endowment from the family of the nation's leading forester, Gifford Pinchot, had allowed Yale to establish the first graduate school of forestry in the United States. "The school promoted Pinchot's doctrine of scientific resource management and what Samuel Hayes has characterized as the Progressive Era's 'gospel of eYciency.'" Leopold excelled at Yale—the rigor, formality, and status of the program suited him—although in February 1908 he was put on probation for skipping classes. He put the reprimand behind him and graduated that spring with a bachelor's degree. Leopold returned to Yale that fall, and in 1909 graduated with his master's degree in forestry. That March, Leopold and all thirty-four classmates boarded the SS Comus in New York and steamed to New Orleans on their way to Texas for a final assignment and their civil service exams.
Ricketts enrolled at Illinois State Normal University, outside Bloomington, in 1915. He took courses that academic year but left school to gain some space following an affair with an older, married woman. He traveled, finding work as a bookkeeper at a country club in El Paso, Texas, and as a surveyor's assistant in New Mexico. In September 1917, despite having flat feet, Ricketts was drafted into the army and served back in Illinois at Camp Grant, as a clerk in the Medical Corps. He was discharged after the Armistice in March 1919. That summer, Ricketts enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he concentrated on biology courses.
Ricketts was never concerned with the formal requirements for graduation; he simply wanted to be exposed to knowledge and to new forms of thinking. At the University of Chicago he became a part-time student while working at the Sinclair Refining Company. He left school to escape another romantic predicament during the summer and fall quarters of 1920 and "put on a little knapsack and ... walked through Indiana and Kentucky and North Carolina and Georgia clear into Florida." As Joel Hedgpeth observes in a footnote, "It was characteristic of Ed that when he read about John Muir's selection of the cemetery as the safe place to spend the night in superstitious regions he immediately followed suit."
Ricketts returned to the University of Chicago in 1921, where he was to be forever inspired by Warder Clyde Allee, best known for his 1931 book Animal Aggregations. Allee was Ricketts's favorite teacher, and for the professional Ricketts, everything began with Allee. The student made an equally strong impression on the professor. Even twenty-nine years later, in an interview with Hedgpeth, Allee remembered Ricketts as "a member of a small group of 'Ishmaelites' who tended sometimes to be disturbing, but were always stimulating."
After the fall quarter of 1922, Ricketts left the University of Chicago without formally withdrawing. He had gotten married on August 19 to Anna Barbara Maker, who had moved to Chicago from Pennsylvania, and "impending fatherhood obliged him to consider more reliable ways of making a living."
After college, Leopold and Ricketts continued their separate career paths. When Leopold graduated from Yale, he went to work for Pinchot in the U.S. Forest Service. Leopold was "one of an elite corps of scientifically trained professionals who would develop administrative policies and techniques for the fledgling agency charged since 1905 with responsibility for managing the national forests." Leopold was assigned to the new Southwestern District, embracing Arizona and New Mexico territories. In 1923 Ricketts and his former college roommate, Albert E. Galigher, arranged to move to Monterey and, with Galigher's money, set up a biological supply business. Ricketts postponed departing Chicago until his son, Ed Jr., was born.
CHAPTER 2From Forester to Professor
Aldo Leopold's midwestern upbringing and Ivy League education had prepared him to be a professional, but even from the beginning of his career he showed signs of being much more than that. Curt Meine writes that as a young professional, Leopold was "competent, devoted, and eager." And while it is true that as a graduate of the Yale School of Forestry he was a disciple of Gifford Pinchot, Leopold was different. His attitudes "were too independent to be dominated by anyone, or by any idea. He did not often express those attitudes; they were not yet fully developed, the prevailing philosophies suYced." But Leopold kept his mind open, "ensuring that when new light would be needed, he could help to shed it."
On July 19, 1909, Leopold reported to the year-old Apache National Forest just outside Springerville, in the Arizona Territory. His title was forest assistant, and he carried out reconnaissance and timber cruising. He had problems with his crew. As Meine states, "The problem was not simply that he was a greenhorn, but that he was confidently inflicting his greenness on the others." It was about this time that Leopold's crew shot a female wolf and he saw in her dying eyes a "fierce green fire" that would haunt him the rest of his life.
Leopold had two other dramatic, life-changing experiences during the two decades he spent with the U.S. Forest Service in the Southwest. The first occurred during the spring of 1911. While on temporary duty in Albuquerque, Leopold met Estella Bergere. Soon afterward, he took an assignment as deputy supervisor at the Carson National Forest, near Anonito, Colorado; he quickly became supervisor. Aldo courted Estella long distance, and on October 9, 1912, they were married in Santa Fe. Meine writes, "she sensitized him to an extreme degree. She inspired him in his thought, in his senses, in his work, and in his ambitions, and she would continue to do so for thirty-six years."
Leopold's second experience was much less pleasant. In early April 1913, after settling a range dispute in the Jicarilla district, Leopold got caught in a spring storm that lasted two days and included hail and bouts of rain, sleet, and snow. As he rode back his knees became so swollen that he had to slit his leather riding boots. When Leopold finally returned to headquarters on April 23, his face and limbs were swollen, and two days later he took the train to see physicians in Santa Fe. During the train ride he became "horribly swollen" and arrived in Santa Fe barely alive; had he stayed at Carson much longer he likely would have died. He was suffering from a case of acute nephritis (Bright's disease). His kidneys had failed, and his symptoms were due to renal salt and water retention.
His recovery took more than sixteen months. Six weeks after his diagnosis he had regained enough strength to board a train with Estella and travel to Burlington, Iowa, where he convalesced at his parents' home and she gave birth to their first son, Starker. At his parents' house, Leopold sat on the east porch resting, reading, and contemplating the view of the Mississippi River far below. He had always been a solitary thinker; here his thoughts turned to conservation and back to Carson National Forest, and it wasn't long before these thoughts began to include concern for wild game. In February 1914, Leopold was allowed to return to the Southwest, but not to Carson. He finally resumed work six months later.
We can ask, What do people like Leopold—with big brains they know how to use—do when they have faced death and are on the road to recovery, but are forced to be physically inactive for a long period of time? You can bet they think, and you can bet they ask themselves about the important things in life. Having faced their own mortality, they consider how, with the time they have left, whether short or long, they can make a difference. When Leopold returned to the Southwest, he brought with him a new sense of purpose.
Resuming work, Leopold shifted emphasis from forestry to wildlife assignments and began developing a new program based on cooperative game management that became a model for Forest Service activities nationwide. At this time, Leopold's approach to game management was based on principles of forest management, which was essentially a quantitative assessment of a natural resource. "Game could bring nearly as much income to the region as timber or grazing uses of the forests, he calculated, if enough effort, intelligence, and money were committed to develop the resource ... the idea was not merely to rear game and then release it to be shot, but to manipulate habitat so that, in effect, the game raised itself." A key feature of Leopold's new program was the extermination of top predators, including wolves and mountain lions.
For his successes in the Southwest, Leopold received a letter of congratulation from Theodore Roosevelt in January 1917. In July, Hornaday's Permanent Wild Life Protection Fund awarded Leopold its gold medal. In his acceptance speech, Leopold stated that the ideal was "to restore to every citizen his inalienable right to know and love the wild things of his native land. We conceive of these wild things as an integral part of our national environment, and are striving to promote, restore, and develop them not as so many pounds of meat, nor as so many things to shoot at, but as a tremendous social asset, as a source of democratic and healthful recreation to the millions of today and the tens of millions of tomorrow."
The United States entered World War I in April 1917, and because of his age, questionable health, and family (Luna, and later Nina and Carl, were born in New Mexico), Leopold was excused from the draft. About this time, Leopold found a quotation in Harper's magazine that became his credo: "We ... want culture, by which I mean no mere affectation of knowledge, nor any power of glib speech, or idle command of the fopperies of art and literature, but, rather, an intelligent interest in the possibilities of living."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Leopold's Shack and Ricketts's Lab by Michael J. Lannoo. Copyright © 2010 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: Out of the Midwest Chapter 2: From Forester to Professor Chapter 3: From Businessman to Sage Chapter 4: Game Management Chapter 5: Between Pacific Tides Intercalary I Chapter 6: The Shack Chapter 7: The Lab Intercalary II Chapter 8: A Sand County Almanac Chapter 9: Sea of Cortez Intercalary III Chapter 10: Daily Lives and Professional Expectations Chapter 11: From Natural History to Ecology Chapter 12: Leopold’s Approach Chapter 13: Ricketts’s Approach Chapter 14: Shared and Complementary Perspectives Intercalary IV Chapter 15: Transcendence Chapter 16: Ethic and Engagement Chapter 17: Where Their Spirit Lives On The Shack and the Lab Notes IndexWhat People are Saying About This
"Heavily referenced and annotated, this book is highly recommended to all."—Chicago Botanic Garden
"Charming little book."—Ecology
"Charming little book."—Ecology