A Walk Into Aldo Leopold's Edges 23 July 2018
Black-throated Green Warbler in the big leaves of young aspen
Wisconsin has a rich legacy of conservation thinkers. While we have imported great minds from elsewhere and nurtured them in our ecosystems and have equally exported great minds from their birthplace here to places more geologically magestic, the connections between landmark conservation biology and Wisconsin is unmistakable. John Muir and Gaylord Nelson, both Wisconsin-born greats, are joined in good company and in our collective memories by Wisconsin greats such as Frances Hamerstrom, Emma Toft, Aldo Leopold, and countless others. Thinkers, teachers, and activists, they trail-blazed the conservation movement in the era of industry, fossil fuels, and information technology.
I find two things interesting as I perch on the top of my hill of life, seeing my 48 years from an equal amount of youth and wisdom. First, I find my perspective on conservation is both widening and deepening, pulling in perspectives of economics, water protection, air quality, and human health. Secondly, I find that the youth of today lack perspective as I did (and often do), and must be reminded of what was saved from the brink, encouraging our future leaders to find sustainable solutions to economic demand. As always, we are in the best of modern times, teetering on the brink of the worst of times all over again.
Hermit Thrush, bathed in sunlight at the forest's edge
I find that the lessons of wilderness, still running blood red in my veins, are now feeding into the capillaries of my superficial flesh, gentling nourishing my aged acceptance of those land practices that induce vigorous change. I have come to understand the responsibility of wilderness preservation in areas of spectacular quality and water sensitivity as being balanced squarely upon a necessity in maintaining a healthy economy through sustainable practices. As part of this economic health, we must see logging in our national, state, county, township, and private forests in order to better protect the larger environmental-economic status quo. Our founding Mothers and Fathers in conservation understood this, and, many essays written and laws enacted, the discoveries still remain to be read, explored, and understood with momentum into the future. Balance is key.
Aldo Leopold's lesson on Illinois and the missing prairie soils, plowed over and replaced by dollars, serves to steer our gaze into the future as well as the past. Will the Boundary Waters be the next Illinois? Sure, there are places to mine, but, more importantly and very clearly, places where it will never be acceptable to mine, ever. In an era of "jobs, jobs, jobs", we must still show restraint with respect to the future. Aldo Leopold made a great, calculated patriotic risk during World War II, confronting his own fear of appearing less than patriotic and acting with great bravery when he appealed to congress to spare the Porcupine Wilderness. It was a time when resource harvest meant victory overseas and the United States was nationally rationing everything possible. Well, we won the war long ago, and we did it without logging the Porcupine Mountains! The Porcupine Mountains still embrace an ancient forest that was spared by a patriotic appeal and stand as testimony of calculated restraint for a better future. Wisconsin's own Gaylord Nelson understood this well, so many of his ideas reflecting the Indigenous ideals of considering the future, the yet unborn children who have equal right to the health and quality of the land and water.
Aldo Leopold loved grouse and woodcock, two species that depend upon forest disturbance through storm, wind, fire, and human machines. Indeed, fire, wind, storms, tree disease, and industrious beavers create sunny openings in even the most contiguous, old growth forests within wilderness. In areas of less protection, we make these openings too, often rapidly and with a lot of commotion. These sunny openings are places where nutrients return to cycling and photosynthesis is jump-started. They are thriving hubs of biological diversity where edge species thrive and interior species curiously calculate variables in long division along the razor's edge of "better-living-in-the-moment" divided by "catastrophic-exposed-vulnerabilities." Perhaps there is poetry in the way we consistently refer to these ecological areas as "edges". They are physical edges, species aggregate edges, and, for many, the edge of the survival equation. They also represent the edge of conservation thinking. There are places to protect, and there are places to harvest.
Chestnut-sided Warbler, a bird of young growth, carrying a shield bug (Hemiptera)
Leopold wrote often of the edge effects, the biological physiognomy of habitat edges where transitions became hubs of life. Lessons in basic wildlife management or wise poetic prose on how to better find a grouse were so often based on the transitional edges between habitats. As a hunter, as a wildlife photographer, and as a nature enthusiast, I hear the words of Aldo Leopold when I see sun-dappled forest ahead and find my feet moving enthusiastically toward a sunny edge. When I see the young aspen poking up, the stumps and slash piles, the story of localized destruction that used to turn my stomach, I now find I am old enough to see the beauty and the promise of renewal. I now see the ecological edge that nurtures a rapid pace of life and sends that pulse in shock-waves deep into the older, shaded forests, much like a heart sending life blood through a body. There are places to protect, and there are places to harvest. Wisdom in conservation is to know the difference.
All images were made at the edges of logging operations in the public lands of Wisconsin, amid the mosaic of forest management practices. I used a Canon 7D Mark I with a Canon EF 400mm f 5.6 L lens.
