Originally Posted by
MOWGLI16
OK, so Leopold kills a wolf, sees the "fierce green fire" disappear from the wolfs eye, and then comes up with the idea of "thinking like a mountain." It turns out to be a turning point in his life. He ends up working with the Wilderness Society, whose work inspires the Wilderness Act of 1964. Now hikers have deginated wilderness areas to roam in - in large part because of Aldo Leopold's work.
What do I win?
Congratulations! You are educated in Wilderness Preservation History!
I have just sent you a prize in the mail (hint: 27cent stamp)!
For everyone else, words from Aldo Leopold, from Sand County Almanac, published in 1948:
[....] We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock.
In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy; how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable side-rocks.
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. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
* * *
Since then 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. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers.
Read more about Aldo Leopold, one of the most important figures in American and World Wilderness preservation..... http://leopold.wilderness.net/aboutus/aldo.htm