The legacy of late ecologist, author and professor Aldo Leopold still runs strong at the University of Wisconsin. The campus community honors him with a dorm, scholarship and research award named after him, and most recently, an entire section of UW’s digital library system dedicated to his journals.
In December, a team of volunteers finished transcribing Aldo Leopold’s Shack Journals into UW’s Digital Library system. Now, anyone with a UW NetID can flip through all 1,100 pages of his Shack Journals as well as miscellaneous records kept by Leopold since 1899, when he was just 12 years old, according to UW News.
Though a boon to Leopold enthusiasts and Wisconsin ecologists, the Leopold archives are likely not at the top of the reading list for most students. Still, the paper trail of one of UW’s most influential and famous academics offers much wisdom for young scholars. Here are three takeaways from the Leopold archives.
Leopold approached life with rare empiricism
Many of the archives’ earliest entries are from notebooks Leopold kept in high school. Perhaps the most surprising about these entries is that most are simply taxonomic lists of birds he had seen over time. For instance, in 1903 — when Leopold was 16 — he kept a list of all the visitant, resident and migratory birds he saw throughout that winter and spring.
He includes no extraneous information, just bird names and numbers. Whatever other thoughts were floating around Leopold’s high school brain, he recorded the presence of the birds around him with impressive discipline.
Some of these early entries venture into the speculative, showing the natural progression from strict observation to insight. For instance, in a 1903 high school entry titled “Interspecific Understanding,” Leopold describes a jaunt through the woods and the observations that followed.
The following is an excerpt from these observations.
“While perched here he [the barred owl] was discovered by a straggling flock of Chickadees, who gathered on the neighboring branches, giving vent to angry notes. Immediately a Blue Jay, who to all appearances had heard the scolding, came flying from a distant part of the woods and joined the Chickadees.”
Leopold later adds that a passing flock of crows joined in the ruckus. This observation, though simple, is a testament to the power of examining the events of everyday life. Today, interspecific bird interactions could form the basis for a Ph.D. thesis.
Leopold would continue to record seemingly rote observations throughout his life and much of the data he recorded while on hunting trips, working in the U.S. Forestry Service and living on his Baraboo farm would go on to inform his seminal work, “A Sand County Almanac,” according to UW News. Even today, Leopold’s weather records offer valuable insight into climate change in Wisconsin, according to Wildlife Ecology and Environmental Studies Professor Stan Temple.
Leopold’s work was interdisciplinary
Leopold’s obsessive interest in ecology is impossible to miss, but the attention he paid to the humanities shines through too. Within the archive is a journal titled “quotations,” in which Leopold jotted down and pasted in poignant excerpts and often entire poems.
The journal totals 78 pages and contains quotations from the likes of Don Quixote to Xenophon to Charlotte Brontë. The humanities and STEM are often presented as distinct, independent fields in school. Brains are depicted dichotomously, with logic on the left and creativity on the right — a myth that has been long disproven, according to Wharton Work. Some students “just have it” in math class and others are “natural” painters. Though there is some evidence to suggest genetics play a part in what subjects students choose to study, Leopold’s lifework shows just how much scientific and humanitarian insight cannot exist without each other.
By studying both intensely, Leopold greatly magnified his perceptions of each, according to Aldo Leopold Foundation Senior Fellow Curt Meine.
As a professor, Leopold impressed the importance of developing perceptive faculties in his pupils and maintained it as a lifelong exercise himself, according to Meine.
“This was what he tried to teach his students, and that he was doing all the time, from the time he was a boy to the day died, it was all about learning perception,” Meine said.
Hard work pays off
The brief successes in the march toward a degree can sometimes feel like nothing more than a series of false peaks. One semester ends and the drudgery of the next is just a month or two away. Leopold’s journals are a stark reminder of the thousands of inglorious hours that mark education and study, yet the success of his character and ideas should spring some hope in even the most despondent students.
Despite not achieving widespread success until two decades after his death, Leopold’s most famous book, “A Sand County Almanac,” eventually grew to be deeply respected. The book shifted attitudes on conservation and ecology in the U.S. forever, according to Temple.
“This is a pivotal piece of writing, that he’s proposing a complete change in our relationship with nature, that we have an ethical relationship with nature and not just dominating it and using nature for our own hands,” Temple said.
“A Sand County Almanac” represents a lifework, a culminating portfolio of research, writing and thoughts, marked by its ability to appeal to the emotions of the public while simultaneously conveying groundbreaking ecological concepts, according to Temple.
Leopold may have been a once-in-a-generation thinker, but his methods and style do not need to be unique to him. Leopold committed to living an examined life and his fluency in science and the humanities brought the mysteries of the world into special relief, according to Meine.
“It’s not just the superficial attractiveness of an organism or a place or whatever it is,” Meine said. “As you would call it, the drama of its inner workings, the stories embedded in the land and the workings of the landscape, ecologically and evolutionarily. And there was beauty in that, and that shows up most directly if you read Leopold’s essay called ‘Marshland Elegy’ and his book ‘A Sand County Almanac’. It’s about grades.”
