Abstract
By 1909—the start of Aldo Leopold’s professional career—the United States had traveled far on a journey toward material prosperity within its continent of natural bounty. The New World was a cornucopia of land products. Already it had fed industrial revolutions in western Europe and in America, helping to transform the world. Its natural wealth also had stimulated the emergence of a new, multiethnic civilization—a capitalist industrial one characterized by individualism, faith in science and technology, democracy, and economic growth. Most Americans were engaged in a hopeful quest for progress, and they were working hard at it, in a pulsing combination of people, land, and dreams. Fresh out of forestry school and assigned to America’s southwestern frontier, Leopold was caught up in the exciting bustle of the times, though doubts would soon arise in his mind about where the country was heading.
The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life.
President Theodore Roosevelt, June 10, 1907
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
C.A. Beard and M.R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1930); J. Bronowski and E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution,1789–1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962); S. P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism, 1885–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); H. D. Croly, The Promise of American Life, edited by A. M. Schlesinger Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press,1965).
- 2.
U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1908 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,1909), pp. 19–21.
- 3.
Statistical Abstract: 1910, pp. 33, 48–49. Density ranged from 0.7 people per square mile in Nevada to 5,517.8 people per square mile in the District of Columbia. Arizona and New Mexico, where Leopold worked, held populations of 204,354 and 327,301 people and densities of 1.8 and 2.7 people per square mile (1910 figures), respectively.
- 4.
Statistical Abstract: 1909, p. 23.
- 5.
Ibid., p. 734.
- 6.
Statistical Abstract: 1917, pp. 125–126, 247–257. Farmers numbered nearly 6million out of 38million, or 16 percent, of the gainfully employed.
- 7.
Statistical Abstract: 1909, p. 32.
- 8.
Statistical Abstract: 1917, pp. 247–257. There were about 10.5 million Americans working in manufacturing and mechanical industries by 1910.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 744.
- 10.
Statistical Abstract: 1910, p. 715.
- 11.
Statistical Abstract: 1911, p. 279.
- 12.
Ibid., pp. 308–314.
- 13.
Ibid., p. 278.
- 14.
R. A. Long, in Proceedings of a Conference of the Governors of the United States, 1908, White House, May 13–15 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), p. 89.
- 15.
Statistical Abstract: 1910, p. 161.
- 16.
Ibid., pp. 163–164.
- 17.
Ibid., p. 165.
- 18.
An M ft. is 1,000 feet, board measure, and a board foot of timber is one foot long, one foot wide, and one inch or less thick.
- 19.
Statistical Abstract: 1910, p. 165.Up from18millionMft.milled annually in the 1880s.
- 20.
Ibid., p. 162.
- 21.
J. J. Berger, Understanding Forests (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1998),p. 29.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Statistical Abstract: 1909, pp. 159–160. Also see the Forest History Society’s Web site, http://www.lib.duke.edu/forest/Research/usfscoll/people/Pinchot/Pinchot.html (accessed 8 December 2005); these figures include national forests established in Alaska (1909) and Puerto Rico (1903). The first installments of forest conservation are recounted in R. W. Judd, “A Wonderfull Order and Ballance: Natural History and the Beginnings of Forest Conservation in America, 1730–1830,” Environmental History 11, no. 1(2006): 8–36, and D. Pisani, “Forests and Conservation, 1865–1890,” in American Forests: Nature, Culture, and Politics, edited by C. Miller (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), pp. 15–34.
- 24.
The Forest Reserve Act of 1891 had given the president power to proclaim national forest reserves. The Fulton Amendment of 1907would disallow the president’s setting aside of additional national forests in the six northwestern states. On the eve of this bill’s signing Roosevelt, with assistance from Gifford Pinchot and his assistant Arthur Ringland, mapped out millions of acres of new reserves in these six states, and Roosevelt signed a proclamation establishing them. On the first forest reserves, see H. K. Steen, “The Beginning of the National Forest System,” in American Forests: Nature, Culture, and Politics, edited by C. Miller (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,1997), pp. 49–68, and H. K. Steen, ed., The Origins of the National Forests(Durham, NC: Forest History Society, 1992).
- 25.
Statistical Abstract: 1909, pp. 159–160.
- 26.
Ibid., p. 156.
- 27.
U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Forests and Forest Products Series L 1-223 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976), p. 534.
- 28.
Statistical Abstract: 1909, p. 156.
- 29.
Statistical Abstract: 1917, p. 247. The U.S. Bureau of the Census counted about 4,332 professional foresters in 1910. But fewer than that number had been trained in the nation’s only two college forestry programs, which existed at Cornell and Yale. In 1909 only 91 foresters received bachelor’s and master’s degrees. In 1939, however, the numbers had risen to more than twenty colleges graduating a total of 1,200 foresters. See D. W. MacCleery, American Forests: A History of Resiliency and Recovery, 3rd ed. (Durham, NC: Forest History Society, 1994), p. 28, and G. W. Williams, The USDA Forest Service—the First Century, Publication No. FS-650 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, 2000).
- 30.
C. D. Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 80.
- 31.
G. Pinchot, “An American Fable,” National Geographic 19, no. 5 (May1908): 347.
- 32.
Leopold quoted this estimate in 1904; see AL, “The Maintenance of the Forests,” RMG, p. 37.
- 33.
Ibid. See D. W. MacCleery, American Forests: A History of Resiliency and Recovery, 3rd ed. (Durham, NC: Forest History Society, 1994). Logged lands not converted to other uses regenerated, MacCleery claims, with net annual wood growth rebounding nationally beginning around 1920. But even in regrown areas a legacy remained of important differences in forest distributions, ages, and species compositions, between regrown forest and pre-logged forest, the former becoming predominant in the country. In the final decade of the twentieth century, the United States had about the same forest area as in 1920, but 55 percent of the nation’s forests were fewer than 50 years old and only 6 percent were 175 years old or older. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, U.S. Forest Facts and Historical Trends, FS-696-M (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service,2001).
- 34.
An overview of conservation in the first half of the twentieth century is provided in C. R. Koppes, “Efficiency, Equity, Esthetics: Shifting Themes in American Conservation,” in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, edited by D. Worster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 230–251.
- 35.
F. J. Turner, “The Problem of the West,” Atlantic Monthly 78, no. 467 (1896):290.
- 36.
Ibid., p. 294.
- 37.
Ibid., p. 293.
- 38.
Ibid., p. 294.
- 39.
Ibid., pp. 294–295.
- 40.
C. Richter, The Trees (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), pp. 5–7. The reaction of settlers to new land and its healthfulness, though with little attention to forests and vegetative communities as such, is explored in C. B. Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
- 41.
Meine, Aldo Leopold, pp. 87–105. See AL, “Escudilla,” SCA, pp. 133–136.
- 42.
F.H. Olmstead, Gila River Flood Control, 65th Cong., 3rd sess., Document No. 436 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), pp. 7–8.
- 43.
G. P. Winship, Why Coronado Went to New Mexico in 1540 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896).
- 44.
The annual average amount and value of mine timbers extracted from forests between 1912 and 1921 was close to 300 million cubic feet and $57 million. Statistical Abstract: 1924, p. 690. Before 1850 the United States mined an inconsequential amount of copper; by 1906 it was mining 58 percent of the world’s production of that mineral. Proceedings of a Conference of Governors, p. 46. In 1909 more than 1 billion pounds was being mined, with a total value of $142,083,711.
- 45.
AL, letter to Clara Leopold, 7 October 1909, LP 10-8, 7. See Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 94.
- 46.
AL, letter to Clara Leopold, 13 January 1911, LP 10-8, 7; Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 103. See also AL, “Maintenance of the Forests,” pp. 37–39.
- 47.
See Meine, Aldo Leopold, pp. 106–123.
- 48.
Meine, Aldo Leopold, pp. 119–121.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
AL, letter to Estella Bergere, 2 February 1912, LP 10-8, 8. See Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 120.
- 51.
M. Lorbieki, Aldo Leopold: A Fierce Green Fire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 66–67.
- 52.
Copied down in Aldo Leopold’s personal journal, p. 50, LP 10-7, 1 (15).
- 53.
AL, letter to Clara Leopold, 17November 1909, LP 10-8, 7. See Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 95.
- 54.
AL, “A Man’s Leisure Time,” address to the University of New Mexico Assembly, 15 October 1920, p. 4, LP 10-6, 16 (4). A revised version appears in RR, pp. 3–8.
- 55.
Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 108;AL, letter to Clara Leopold, 3 June 1911,LP10-8, 7.
- 56.
Meine, Aldo Leopold, pp. 121–122; AL, letter to Estella Bergere, 21 May1912, LP 10-8, 8.
- 57.
W. Whitman, “America’s Characteristic Landscape,” in Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, edited by Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), pp. 853, 864.
- 58.
Ibid.
- 59.
W. Whitman, “The Prairies,” Ibid., p. 853.
- 60.
D. Worster, “John Muir and the Modern Passion for Nature,” Environmental History10, no. 1 (2005): 8–19.
- 61.
Marsh’s book was revised and republished in 1874 with the new title The Earth as Modified by Human Action. See D. Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation (Seattle: University of Washington Press,2000);M. Williams, Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and M. Williams, Americans and Their Forests (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
- 62.
W. deBuys, ed., Seeing Things Whole: The Essential John Wesley Powell(Washington, DC: Island Press, Shearwater Books, 2001); D. Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
- 63.
H. Adams, quoted in Turner, “Problem of the West,” p. 4.
- 64.
The Organic Act of 1897 was passed “to improve and protect the forest within the boundaries, or for the purpose of securing favorable conditions of water flows, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of the citizens of the United States.”
- 65.
T. Roosevelt, “Opening Address by the President,” in Proceedings of a Conference of Governors, p. 3.
- 66.
Ibid., p. 6.
- 67.
R. A. Long, “Forest Conservation,” in Proceedings of a Conference of Governors, p. 83.
- 68.
T. C. Chamberlin, “Soil Wastage,” in Proceedings of a Conference of Governors, p. 77.
- 69.
Ibid.
- 70.
Ibid., p. 78.
- 71.
C. R. Van Hise, “Address,” in Proceedings of a Conference of Governors, p. 45.
- 72.
Ibid., p. 48.
- 73.
Ibid., p. 47.
- 74.
J.M. Carey, “Address,” in Proceedings of a Conference of Governors, p. 149.
- 75.
Ibid.
- 76.
W. J. McGee, “The Relations among the Resources,” in Proceedings of the National Conservation Congress, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: U.S. Congress,1909), p. 100.
- 77.
Ibid.
- 78.
Chamberlin, “Soil Wastage,” p. 76.
- 79.
Also at this time Hardy Webster Campbell popularized dry farming—an agricultural technique that called for plowing and planting practices intended to keep moisture in the soil in areas with rainfall insufficient for crops.
- 80.
T. Roosevelt, “The New Nationalism,” 1910 campaign speech, http://www.edheritage.org/1910/pridocs/1910roosevelt.htm (accessed 18 February2006).
- 81.
Roosevelt, “Opening Address,” p. 10. The idea of greater coordination and more forceful national leadership was not confined to the United States at the time. Great Britain, too, could see the benefits of societal unity and centralized, science-based guidance at the national level. Winston Churchill expressed this new orientation in Liberalism and the Social Problem, also published in 1909. See Croly, Promise of American Life, p. xi.
- 82.
Roosevelt, “New Nationalism.”
- 83.
See Croly, Promise of American Life, and D. Worster, The Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
- 84.
In addition to population growth from reproductively expanding families, immigration numbers were rising—from387,203 in 1870 to more than a million annually by 1905. Statistical Abstract: 1909, 91.
- 85.
Turner, “Problem of the West,” p. 297.
- 86.
C. J. Blanchard, “The Call of the West: Homes Are Being Made for Millions of People in the Arid West,” National Geographic 20, no. 5 (1909): 403–436.
- 87.
Ibid., p. 403.
- 88.
Ibid.
- 89.
Ibid.
- 90.
Roosevelt, “New Nationalism.”
- 91.
Ibid.
- 92.
Pinchot, “American Fable,” pp. 348–349.
- 93.
Ibid., p. 349.
- 94.
McGee, “Relations among the Resources,” p. 100.
- 95.
Chamberlin, “Soil Wastage,” p. 77.
- 96.
Long, “Forest Conservation,” p. 84.
- 97.
See G. Pinchot, The Use of the National Forests: Regulations and Instructions for the Use of the National Forests, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1907).And see H. S. Graves, The Use Book: A Manual of Information about the National Forests, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918). Leopold summarized the purposes of the national forests under the Organic Act in his Watershed Handbook (Albuquerque: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, District 3,December1923 [revised and reissued October 1934]), p. 10, LP 10-11, 1.
- 98.
AL, “The Maintenance of Forests,” RMG, p. 38.
- 99.
Meine, Aldo Leopold, pp. 122–125.
- 100.
Ibid., p. 128.
- 101.
AL, “To the Forest Officers of the Carson,” Carson Pine Cone (15 July1913); also in RMG, pp. 41–46.
- 102.
Ibid., p. 43.
- 103.
Ibid.
- 104.
Ibid.
- 105.
Ibid.
- 106.
AL, letter to Carl A. Leopold, 1 October 1914, LP 10-8, 8. See Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 132.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Julianne Lutz Warren
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Warren, J.L. (2016). Seed Plots. In: Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey, Tenth Anniversary Edition. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-754-4_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-754-4_2
Publisher Name: Island Press, Washington, DC
Print ISBN: 978-1-61091-568-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-61091-754-4
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)