aldo leopold thinking like a mountain essay

Thinking Wilderness

Marking 50 years of wilderness with creativity, art, reflection and debate, aldo leopold, “thinking like a mountain” (in memoriam).

The importance of Leopold’s work and our choice to feature it arises not only from his contributions to modern environmental ethics but his profound impact on Wilderness conservation. By helping to establish the Wilderness Society in 1935, Leopold challenged concepts and practices that he himself had propagated earlier in his career, such as federal predator control policy. Today his legacy lives on in many ways, including the transformation of game management policy in the U.S. In 1995 the first grey wolf was returned to Yellowstone park. As the debate continues around the importance of predation within ecosystems, Leopold’s concerns are as valid now as they were in his time. His understanding of interconnected relationships whether interpersonal, societal or with the landscape, he championed a holistic approach beyond conquest and self-interest.

Without further ado, we hope you enjoy reading for the first time or revisiting “Thinking Like A Mountain” HERE .

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Thinking Like a Mountain

Several years ago, I used Aldo Leopold’s essay “Thinking Like a Mountain” to broaden my students’ perspective-taking skills in matters relating to the natural environment. In this essay, Leopold explains how he and others with him shot and killed a wolf on a mountain just for the excitement of doing so. As he watched the wolf die, Leopold suddenly realized that “there was something in those [the wolf’s] eyes known only to the wolf and the mountain.” Leopold explains how, without wolves, deer proliferate and eat the vegetation that grows on the side of the mountain. Once this vegetation is gone, other plants and animals disappear as well. Without the vegetation to provide stability on the slopes, even the mountain itself becomes at risk for destructive landslides. The entire ecosystem of a mountain changes when wolves are no longer present. The mountain, Leopold suggests, lives in mortal fear of deer and depends on wolves to keep the population of deer in check. 

I paired the discussion of this essay with a “Council of All Beings” group activity. This exercise calls for participants to “step aside from their human identity” and take the perspective of another life-form such as a wolf. (Students could also take on the perspective of a mountain, river, forest and so on.) This exercise was originally created by John Seed and Joanna Macy to help people feel deep empathy for the myriad species and landscapes of the earth.

The response from the students was exactly what I was hoping for: enthusiasm and positive comments about new insights they’d gained. Several students commented on how this activity reminded them to consider more than themselves when deciding on a course of action. While the focus of both Leopold’s essay and the Council of All Beings exercise was on considering how our actions impact the natural world, some students commented on how we should also think about other people before we act.

I was teaching college students at the time but have since worked with elementary teachers who used this same idea with their students, some as young as third grade. The teachers’ responses were overwhelmingly positive. Several teachers noted how all the students loved this activity—even the hard-to-motivate students. In working with the teachers, I suggested these six steps:

• Introduce Leopold’s story in a way that’s appropriate to the level of your students. Invite students to comment on why “Thinking Like a Mountain” is a good title for this essay.
• Introduce the Council of All Beings activity by briefly discussing the meaning and purpose of a council. If applicable, you might relate this to a student council where students can express their concerns about what happens at their school. Explain that the purpose of a Council of All Beings is to give other creatures a chance to express their concerns about what is happening to them because of human activity. Tell the students that they will each take on the role of an animal and speak for that animal at the council. 
• Have each student choose an animal and research how human activity might be impacting that animal. Students should also make a mask of their animal and write a script for what it will say at the council meeting.
• On the day of the council, have students sit in a circle and then, one by one, speak for their animals.  
• After all the “animals” have spoken, allow some time for a sharing of feelings and thoughts. Encourage group problem solving around the concerns expressed by the animals. Include a discussion about what we could do as humans to help the animals. If possible, identify several specific steps that could be taken at school and at home.

After the council, the students’ masks could be displayed under a “Thinking Like a Mountain” heading.  Some schools, after initial Council of All Beings exercises, have prepared theatrical productions of the council to share with others. One teacher had her students mentor their peers in another class through the steps of preparing for a Council of all Beings.

I found that the Council of All Beings can be used as an effective cross-disciplinary exercise at any level of education. This exercise not only fosters imaginative and critical thinking but also addresses a number of language arts, science and social studies goals. Most important, however, is the way this exercise helps students think outside of themselves and develop a sense of compassion and caring for all living things.

Wilson is an educational consultant and curriculum writer.

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Thinking like a mountain, arts & culture.

The art and life of Mark di Suvero

How Aldo Leopold came to conservationism.

Aldo Leopold on a trip to the Rio Gavilan, ca. 1936. Photo: U.S. Forest Service

On the first day of April 1944, Aldo Leopold sat down at his desk to craft a confession. Leopold’s reputation was already growing across the country—a champion of modern wildlife management and the father of the Gila Wilderness, he was known as a good man and great teacher—but this would be something new and strange from a figure many would come to revere as the patron saint of American conservation. Leopold had recently received a letter, one in a long series of correspondence with his friend, Hans Albert Hochbaum, critiquing the essays Leopold was slowly producing for a book. Hochbaum mentioned the wolf, an animal that remained conspicuously absent from Leopold’s drafts: “I think you’ll have to admit you’ve got at least a drop of its blood on your hands.”

Hochbaum was talking generally, but the comment reminded Leopold of an incident that dated back to 1909, when he was just twenty-two.

At the start of July, with summer beginning its slow boil, he had boarded the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway, leaving behind the familiar world of Fort Madison, Iowa, for a long journey down to the still-exotic Southwest. He rumbled through Marceline and Kansas City, and then out across Big Sky country, where agricultural expansion had consumed the bison and the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Osage, Pawnee, and Kiowa tribes. Along the way, the train stopped at Fred Harvey eating houses—America’s first restaurant chain—as it threaded its way to “old Santa Fe,” where “we shall hear a strange tongue,” one railway book explained, “and we may easily imagine ourselves transported beyond the confines of the United States, into Mexico or Spain.” Tourists had begun to flow into the New Mexico and Arizona territories, following the homesteaders and Texas cowboys. But Leopold, fresh out of Yale’s forestry school, was hardly a tourist, and his destination was far beyond the reach of railway tracks.

After a short stay in Albuquerque, he boarded another train west, skirting the top of modern-day Catron County before crossing the border into Arizona, where he would remain for much of the next two years. He arrived at the Navajo trading post of Holbrook and hired a horse-drawn stagecoach to ford the southern plains to Springerville, a two-day journey of some one hundred miles. Beyond Springerville, a dusty settlement of low-rise buildings and open space gave way to claustrophobic canyons and alpine forests scattered over the White Mountains. Here, Leopold would encounter deer flies and locust thorns, terrifying lightning and hailstorms, and “those unclassified mounted men of unknown origin and uncertain destination always found on frontiers.” Time concertinaed in such a way that one could plow up a dagger from Coronado’s expedition of 1540 as though it had happened yesterday.

Leopold had come in order to work for the U.S. Forest Service. One of the government’s new mandates at the time was a timber stocktake, the counting of trees on exhausting month-long reconnaissance trips. This stocktake had become particularly urgent: copper mines had opened in Clifton, and their engines were demanding to be fed. The Apache National Forest offered “millions of acres, billions of feet of timber, all vast amounts of capital,” Leopold explained in a letter to his mother. “Why it’s fun to twiddle them around your fingers, especially when you consider your very modest amount of experience.”

One morning Leopold took a break to eat lunch with another forester on the rimrock of Black Canyon, which resembles a loaf of bread that’s risen so high it has split down the middle. Black River courses along the bottom, carving its path between willows and cinnamon-colored ponderosas, and the canyon walls are steep, footed with scree. Leopold gazed down at the stream. He noticed a doe, pushing her way through the cold current. When she cleared the water, beginning to shake herself dry, Leopold realized she was actually a wolf. Suddenly, a half dozen other wolves appeared nearby—grown pups, skirmishing together at the base of the rimrock. 

To Leopold, a forest with wolves felt different from a forest without them; it was more immediate, watchful, and alive, a place where meaning could be sensed in “the midnight whinny of a pack horse, the rattle of rolling rocks, the bound of a fleeing deer, the way shadows lie under the spruces.”

But as a young hunter, he had no fondness for lobos. To him, all predators were vermin, interfering with natural resources, harming game populations and the profits of stock herders. He supported efforts to eradicate wolves because fewer wolves would mean more deer, and more deer would be a “hunter’s paradise.” This would take patience, time, and money, “but the last one must be caught before the job can be called fully successful.”

Leopold grabbed his Winchester—a trapper design, lightweight, short barrel—aimed into the canyon, and opened fire. His companion dropped his lunch and followed suit. Shot after shot echoed through the hardwoods until their rifle barrels were empty. By then the adult wolf was down, and one of her pups was dragging its shattered leg toward the rocky talus.    

The two men descended into the canyon. Leopold had a strong code of sportsmanship he’d learned from his father on childhood hunts: neither was the kind of man to abandon injured animals. When he reached the wolf, bleeding where she’d fallen by the current, he moved closer. Then he froze. Something was different. Something about the wolf he’d never seen before: “a fierce green fire, dying in her eyes.” The fire flared and flickered out, leaving silence, but not before it burned a hole through Leopold’s prejudice.

“I realized then,” he wrote at the desk years later, filling page after page of a yellow-ruled pad, “that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain.”

A member of the early Forest Service crossing Buffalo Fork, Black River, below Three Forks on the Apache National Forest, 1921. Photo: C. K. Cooperrider

That green fire radicalized Leopold, the story goes. It was a moment of epiphany, a hard slap. But it’s also not true, or not exactly as Leopold tells it. When he writes “My own conviction on this score dates from the day I saw a wolf die,” he is conflating decades of evolving thought, in the same way somebody might summarize a turbulent courtship as “love at first sight.”

In truth, Leopold’s conversion was gradual. Between the day he was “pumping lead into the pack” and the day he wrote about it thirty-five years later, he studied watersheds and erosion caused by human exploitation. He visited forests in Germany where wolves had been deliberately exterminated— w ä lder now bursting with deer (a “hunter’s paradise”), and yet shockingly degraded and overgrazed. He hiked in the Sierra Madre of northern Mexico, near the Río Gavilán, where wolves had been left alone in what appeared to Leopold as pristine wilderness. He matured from a young man “full of trigger-itch” into a careful professor who listened to others and to the land, a man who wanted to change the ethos of his country.

America at this time was still adjusting to life after the shock of World War II. Conservation was an afterthought, if people thought of it at all—something that would happen automatically if one would only “vote right, obey the law, join some organizations.” There was no personal commitment, Leopold complained, just “letterhead pieties.” By then he was living in Madison, a professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin. He wrote impassioned articles, grumbled in private correspondence, gave call-to-arms addresses at important public conferences. But he knew that for conservation to work in any meaningful sense, it needed to affect people deeply, in the realm of “philosophy, ethics, and religion”—to affect the way they understood the world around them. And so he’d begun writing stories that read like parables, drawing on “episodes in my life that taught me, gradually and sometimes painfully, that the company is out of step.” Gently, he would educate his readers. The wolf shooting would become an exemplar. He titled the essay “Thinking Like a Mountain.”

For most Americans, nature was valuable insofar as it could turn a profit. Leopold termed this attitude Abrahamic : “Abraham knew exactly what the land was for: it was to drip milk and honey into Abraham’s mouth.” Man was the end and purpose of all creation, the conqueror of a kingdom that was waiting like a stocked pantry. Anything that grew too slowly, or could not be rationalized as a useful resource, was up for disposal—white cedar, hemlock, bog marshes, gray wolves. “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us,” Leopold argued. There was a sense of entitlement but not obligation.

Black River East Fork in the White Mountains. Photo: Alan Stark

Of course, that once had been his perspective, too, out in the Apache tallying pine. But not long after those reconnaissance trips Leopold had started to intuit “a closer and deeper relation” between man and the earth. It took many years to articulate it clearly: “a biota so complex, so conditioned by interwoven cooperations and competitions, that no man can say where utility begins or ends. No species can be ‘rated’ without the tongue in the cheek; the old categories of ‘useful’ and ‘harmful’ have validity only as conditioned by time, place, and circumstance.”

The mature Leopold had come to understand the land as a towering biotic pyramid, with predators like wolves at the very apex. The integrity of this pyramid depended on each layer maintained in appropriate balance; removing layers would cause the structure to crumble. Once Homo sapiens adopted this model, Leopold believed, they went “from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.” Humility and respect became paramount. To believe that man could control something so unfathomably complex was hubris. The best a person could aim for was intelligent stewardship.

Today, the biotic model means ecosystems, food chains, and trophic cascade, concepts so familiar they almost seem obvious. In Leopold’s time, though, ecology was a nascent field, proposing a rethink as radical, in many ways, as Copernican heliocentrism. Leopold knew the hurdle for acceptance would be very high, that it might take decades or even centuries for everyone to adopt the ethical imperatives. But he was determined to try. One of his strategies was translating ideas into metaphor and myth. Since watching the green fire die, he wrote,

I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise.

Given his commitment to skepticism, Leopold would have baulked at being called a prophet, but that’s what has happened over time. The “fierce green fire” became as powerful, for some, as the Crucifix, held aloft on a new crusade to reclaim the land of a rewilded America.

“This book looks as harmless as a toy glass pistol filled with colored candy,” wrote a critic from   the  New York Times in 1950. “It turns out to be a .45 automatic fully loaded.”

Aldo Leopold ’ s letters and notebooks are held in the Aldo Leopold Archives at the University of Wisconsin. The two definitive biographies are Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work , by Curt D. Meine, and Thinking Like a Mountain , by Susan L. Flader. Leopold never revealed the exact date or location of the wolf shooting; I write that the shooting occurred in 1909 on the rimrock of the Black Canyon based on the considerable sleuthing of Flader and Meine.

Lance Richardson is a writer living in New York.

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• Thinking Like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude toward Deer, Wolves, and Forests

In this Book

• Susan L. Flader
• Published by: University of Wisconsin Press

When initially published more than twenty years ago, Thinking Like a Mountain was the first of a handful of efforts to capture the work and thought of America's most significant environmental thinker, Aldo Leopold.  This new edition of Susan Flader's masterful account of Leopold's philosophical journey, including a new preface reviewing recent Leopold scholarship, makes this classic case study available again and brings much-deserved attention to the continuing influence and importance of Leopold today.     Thinking Like a Mountain unfolds with Flader's close analysis of Leopold's essay of the same title, which explores issues of predation by studying the interrelationships between deer, wolves, and forests.  Flader shows how his approach to wildlife management and species preservation evolved from his experiences restoring the deer population in the Southwestern United States, his study of the German system of forest and wildlife management, and his efforts to combat the overpopulation of deer in Wisconsin.  His own intellectual development parallels the formation of the conservation movement, reflecting his struggle to understand the relationship between the land and its human and animal inhabitants.     Drawing from the entire corpus of Leopold's works, including published and unpublished writing, correspondence, field notes, and journals, Flader places Leopold in his historical context.  In addition, a biographical sketch draws on personal interviews with family, friends, and colleagues to illuminate his many roles as scientist, philosopher, citizen, policy maker, and teacher.  Flader's insight and profound appreciation of the issues make Thinking Like a Mountain a standard source for readers interested in Leopold scholarship and the development of ecology and conservation in the twentieth century.

Table of Contents

• Title Page, Copyright, Dedication
• pp. vii-viii
• Preface: 1994
• Acknowledgments [Includes Image Plates]
• pp. xxi-xxiii
• 1. Thinking Like a Mountain
• 2. Southwestern Game Fields
• 3. The Gila Experience
• 4. Means and Ends: The 1930s
• pp. 122-167
• 5. Too Many Deer
• pp. 168-205
• 6. Adventures of a Conservation Commissioner
• pp. 206-260
• pp. 261-271
• Bibliographical Note
• pp. 272-276
• Index [Includes Back Cover]
• pp. 277-284

Thinking Like A Mountain

The Aldo Leopold Foundation was founded in 1982 with a mission to foster the land ethic through the legacy of Aldo Leopold, awakening an ecological conscience in people throughout the world.

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Remembering Aldo Leopold, Visionary Conservationist And Writer

Jacki Lyden

Aldo Leopold examines a dead bird. Corbis hide caption

Aldo Leopold examines a dead bird.

"There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot. Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now, we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free." — A Sand County Almanac

A Sand County Almanac , a collection of essays and observations, was written decades ago by Aldo Leopold, the father of the American conservation movement.

The original book was published in 1949, a year after Leopold's death. Leopold pioneered the science of ecology using only binoculars and a notebook to observe wildlife and seasonal patterns in his southwestern Wisconsin home. Even now, 64 years later, Leopold's work is on the cutting edge of his field, and his groundbreaking writings on conservation and ecology become more relevant with each passing year.

Three generations of conservation scientists have been inspired by Leopold's A Sand County Almanac . Stan Temple read the book as a teenager, and was captivated. Now, he is professor emeritus in conservation at the University of Wisconsin, the same position Leopold held during his tenure at the university in the 1930s.

"It's like he was so far ahead of his contemporaries that the things he was writing about before his death really didn't find an audience until 25 years later," Temple says.

Temple would know. He recently used Leopold's journals to gain insight on climate change, though Leopold himself never lived to hear about global warming.

Every single day, Leopold would sit outside on his hand-built bench on his land and write about what he saw, leaving behind a meticulous daily record of the changing seasons and natural patterns of the 1930s and '40s.

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By comparing Leopold's meticulous observations of springtime in his day to springtime in 2012, Temple could clearly see the speed of climate change, and that our winters are getting increasingly warm.

But even when Leopold was writing, the wild lands of America were in a sorry state.

"It was really a time of incredible change in the entire landscape," says biographer Curt Meine. "The great forests of the upper Great Lakes were being leveled, the wetlands of the Mississippi River Basin were being drained, waterfowl and wildlife were being depleted, the prairies of the Midwest were being converted over to agriculture."

In Leopold's youth, Teddy Roosevelt was president, and environmental preservation was a national discussion for the first time. Leopold's father taught him how to hunt and respect the land. Leopold would later graduate from the Yale School of Forestry, and join the Forest Service as a ranger in the mountains of Arizona.

It was on that job that Leopold had an experience that shaped his thinking for the rest of his life. While hunting one day, he and his friends came upon a pack of wolves and opened fire on the animals. Leopold killed an old wolf, and wrote about it 35 years later in one of his most famous essays, "Thinking Like a Mountain."

He wrote: "We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then and have known ever since that there was something new to me in those eyes, something known only to her and to the mountain."

Thinking about this event, Leopold realized that preserving land wasn't enough — we had to actively protect it. So he and his family bought a piece of ravaged land near Baraboo, Wis., and set about rejuvenating it. There were hardly any living plants on the property, and the dry, dusty soil was vulnerable to wind erosion. So Leopold started by planting pine trees. Every spring, he would drag his family up to the tiny shack on the property, and eventually, they had 50,000 planted pine trees bringing life back to the desolated area.

There, inside the bare-bones shack, Leopold wrote his second-most-famous essay, "Land Ethic." The essay argues for the responsible, ethical treatment of nature, which became the core of modern conservationism.

"In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land community, to plain member and citizen of it," he wrote. "It implies respect for his fellow members, and also respect for the community as such."

Leopold's "Land Ethic" is still relevant today, especially given the new challenges of global climate change, and the public debate surrounding the issue.

But Leopold would say that these challenges are what his "Land Ethic" is for.

"It's inconceivable to me" he wrote, "that an ethical relationship to the land can exist without love, respect and admiration, and a high regard for its value."

To Think Like a Mountain: Environmental challenges in the American West

Niels Sparre Nokkentved

WSU Press: 2019

“Thinking like a mountain” is the name of a short essay from Aldo Leopold’s 1949 book A Sand County Almanac . In it, he reflects on an old wolf he shot and killed as a young hunter and how he came to realize wolves play a critical role between prey, such as deer and elk, and the flora of the forest and other natural habitats. He lamented humans need to learn to think like a mountain, or take a long-term view of ecology, including the value of predators.

This similarly titled volume encourages people to do the same thing—to think like a mountain in terms of environmental concerns—in the specific setting of the modern American West. A quote from Leopold’s now-famous essay sets the tone: “Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.”

Niels Sparre Nokkentved spent two decades as an environmental and natural resources reporter for newspapers in Washington, Idaho, and Utah, and eight years as a writer, editor, and photographer for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. His new book of essays explores environmental challenges such as wolf recovery, threats to watersheds by abandoned mines, the lingering effects of grazing private livestock on public lands, overcutting ancient forests, and more.

He writes with the straightforward approach of a former newspaperman, presenting facts, history, policy, and modern milestones. He also includes some of his own photographs as well as short, personal, scene-setting vignettes—from the forests of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula and Pacific waters out past the Grays Harbor bar to Big Smoky Creek in the Soldier Mountains of central Idaho and the foothills of the Jarbridge Mountains in Nevada.

He concludes Mother Nature is losing ground. But, he writes, “When we think like a mountain, we will have clean air and water, forests will thrive, wild salmon will spawn naturally and make thousand-mile journeys to their natal streams, sage grouse will strut their stuff on their leks in the western sagebrush grasslands, and the wild green fire will burn in the eyes of the wolf—and that benefits us all.”

Order To Think Like a Mountain from WSU Press

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Smith: Centennial of nation's first wilderness area highlights Aldo Leopold's legacy

Aldo leopold, well-known as author of "a sand county almanac" and former professor at uw-madison, also is credited with the 1924 creation of the gila wilderness, the nation's first wilderness area..

We Wisconsinites who value the natural world and outdoor recreation hold Aldo Leopold in especially high esteem.

Not only was Leopold a pioneering ecologist, forester and author who profoundly influenced the modern conservation movement, but he spent much of his adult life in the Badger State as a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and cultivator of his family's "shack" on an old farm near Baraboo along the Wisconsin River.

This year, though, is highlighting Leopold's legacy far beyond our state's borders.

It started with a March celebration of the 75th anniversary of the publication of his seminal book "A Sand County Almanac." The collection of essays has been translated into more than a dozen languages and is considered a required text by most in the conservation community.

It continues this week with the centennial commemoration of the Gila Wilderness Area in New Mexico. The Gila was Leopold's idea.

It was the first U.S. public land set aside as wilderness.

We are all the beneficiaries of his way of thinking and the process he helped launch: The U.S. now has 803 wilderness areas covering 111 million acres.

The areas, which generally prohibit motorized transport, are found on federal lands, primarily in national parks and national forests.

The history of how the Gila came to be, and debates about the value of wilderness, help shine light on Leopold's genius and creativity.

The Aldo Leopold Foundation is leading an event Friday in Silver City, New Mexico, to recognize the 100th anniversary of the Gila. It features speakers and panel discussions and is available for free online viewing .

One of the speakers lined up for Friday is Wisconsinite Curt Meine, a Leopold biographer who earlier this year offered a review of the Gila and the concept of wilderness.

"Wilderness is a thread, and a key thread, but it wasn't and is not separate from all these other threads (of Leopold's teachings)," Meine said. "In fact it weaves through and among all of them."

Leopold was a native of Burlington, Iowa, and spent much time outdoors as a youth, both along the Mississippi River near his home and in summers with his family at a cottage in Lake Huron.

Leopold came of age during the progressive movement of conservation led by President Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir and Gifford Pinchot.

Meine said Leopold as a boy dreamed of taking a canoe trip to Hudson Bay.

"He never did," Meine said. "However it was the dream that was the important part."

When Leopold was 15 he also took a trip with his family to Yellowstone National Park and what would become Rocky Mountain National Park.

These experiences in wild country were important in forming Leopold's thinking about conservation.

He later enrolled at Yale University and graduated in 1909 with a degree in forestry. Leopold then joined the U.S. Forest Service; his work took him to the southwestern United States.

It was there he traveled by horseback through the Gila in New Mexico.

At the time automobiles were becoming more affordable to Americans and paved roads were expanding at a rapid pace. Leopold saw value in protecting some areas from such human development. Most of his references were to preserve places to hunt and fish and take pack trips.

In 1921 Leopold released his first essay on the topic. It was published in the Journal of Forestry and titled, "The Wilderness and Its Place in Forest Recreational Policy."

"By 'wilderness' I mean a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks' pack trip and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man," Leopold wrote.

He identified the Gila River headwaters as the last typical wilderness in the southwestern mountains. "Highest use demands its preservation," Leopold wrote.

In 1924 the U.S. Forest Service accepted Leopold's proposal and established the Gila as the first federally recognized wilderness area in the U.S. It covered 500,000 acres then; today, with an adjacent portion called the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, it spans 750,000 acres.

The action was followed in 1964 by Congress passing the Wilderness Act. It holds that "in order to assure that an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States and its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition, it is hereby declared to be the policy of the Congress to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness."

Wisconsin has seven wilderness areas, including five in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest: Blackjack Springs Wilderness northeast of Eagle River; Headwater Wilderness 16 miles southeast of Eagle River; Porcupine Lake Wilderness four miles southeast of Drummond; Rainbow Lake Wilderness four miles north of Drummond; and Whisker Lake Wilderness near Florence.

The other two are Gaylord Nelson Wilderness in the Apostle Islands and Wisconsin Islands Wilderness in Lake Michigan in Door County. Wisconsin Islands is the only one that is not open to the public. The closure is designed to protect critical nesting grounds for terns and other birds.

Over his life, Leopold advocated for wilderness for many reasons and many benefits, Meine said. Among them were: recreation; contrast with "normal" American life; civic virtue; social and ecological resilience; wildlife; humility; research; personal growth; historical and cultural perspective; ethical grounding; and spiritual renewal. 

Meine described the idea of a wilderness area in the early 1920s as "radical." Further, it has remained controversial.

"Designating a large, open space in 1924 as to be free of further development, to remain remote, undeveloped and unfragmented was a radical notion," Meine said. "It provided the opportunities for these future elaborations of values that not only Leopold undertook but many others have continued."

Concerns include the impact on indigenous cultures, Meine said.

"The most important thing is for all of us to take the time to explore the wild places in our own landscapes, no matter how large or small they are, no matter how remote or close to home they may be, but to explore the interwoven natural and cultural histories," Meine said. "100 years ago Leopold saw a need. Now we have the opportunity over the next 100 years to chart new directions and create new connections and build a legacy for our own descendants."

Join the celebration of the Gila Wilderness Area online

As part of the Gila's centennial celebration, on Friday the Aldo Leopold Foundation is offering a free virtual program on wilderness.

It is being held in Silver City, New Mexico, and streamed over the Internet.

The event begins at 10 a.m. Central with a presentation titled "Wilderness: Explorations in Understanding" by Aldo Leopold biographer Curt Meine, Latinx and environmental writer and professor Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and writer and former Gila trout biologist Leeanna Torres. It is followed by panel discussions and at 7 p.m. a session titled "Land Relationships Across Cultures" with Theresa Pasqual, executive vice president of indigenous affairs for Crow Canyon Archaeological Center; Michael Darrow, Fort Sill Apache historian; Corey Torivio, Continental Divide Trail Coalition representative and founder of Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps.

The speaker series was organized and supported in part by: U.S. Forest Service; New Mexico Wild; Trout Unlimited; The Aldo Leopold Foundation; WildEarth Guardians; Gila Resources Information Project; Heart of the Gila; and Continental Divide Trail Coalition.

To register or for more information, visit crowdcast.io/c/gilacentennial .