Aldo Leopold

4 Pages 972 Words

Aldo Leopold: Philosophy of Conservation


In “A Sand County Almanac” written by Aldo Leopold he describes his lessons, his concerns, and his love of nature and its conservation. Through out the book one thing is obvious, Leopold’s fire about nature and his hatred about what we as humans do to it ignorantly. He says it best in this quote “Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.”(p109) Leopold basically says in this quote that humans are very greedy and stupid creatures. Humans only think of themselves and what will be best for us, and not for the environment. Once the environments condition starts effecting is when we start paying attention. Trees and animals cannot talk so we must talk for them and think for them also. When we do something to the environment we should think of the effects to it and what it will disturb and ultimately lead to. When we don’t think of these things and destroy habitat of animals it ultimately leads to extinction. Leopold also had a significant passage about extinction,
“For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. The Cro-Magnon who slew the last mammoth thought only of steaks. The sportsman who shot the last [Passenger] pigeon thought only of his prowess. The sailor who clubbed the last auck thought of nothing at all. But we, who have lost our pigeons, mourn the loss. Had the funeral been ours, the pigeons would hardly have mourned us. In this fact, rather than in Mr. DuPont's nylons or Mr. Vannevar Bush's bombs, lies objective evidence of our superiority over the beasts. (p109-110)
This passage is nothing but true and makes Leopold sick because we think absolutely nothing about it. The person who kills the last tiger will only ...