I watched Green Fire for the second time last week. It is a documentary film about the life and work of Aldo Leopold. The film was produced by the Aldo Leopold Foundation, an educational non-profit that promotes Leopold’s land ethic as the basis for environmental stewardship and ecological restoration.

Green Fire is narrated by Curt Meine, who is Leopold’s major biographer. Throughout the film, Meine interviews various authorities on Leopold, and guides us through several landscapes that were crucial to Leopold’s intellectual development. The film is a great introduction to Leopold and his land ethic, and a very useful starting point for discussions about our troubled relationship to the natural world.

The film has ongoing public screenings around the country, and you can also purchase a copy for personal use or public presentation. To learn more about the documentary and its follow up activities, please visit
Green Fire.

A few thoughts on the film.

Leopold was a formative influence in my own thinking about wildlife and nature. I read his chapters on “Thinking Like A Mountain” and “The Land Ethic” from A Sand County Almanac during a natural history retreat to Star Island in Cass Lake, MN. While the retreat focused on the ecology of northern forest of Minnesota, it became my first introduction to ethics and the environment. I was captivated. The idea that humans were but plain members of a larger ecological and moral community put into words something I had felt for a long time.

As you watch the film, you will notice a bit of hero worship. I do not mean to minimize Leopold’s contributions. His writing is crisp and compelling, and he captures the resonances between ecology and ethics. Still, there are many blank spots on Leopold’s map, and one does well by reading him in conjunction with other ethicists like Mary Midgley, Val Plumwood, Arne Naess, and Holmes Rolston.

This said, Leopold is a touch-stone for many in the traditional conservation movement, including the government agencies that grew out of the progressive era. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service top the list here. The language of ecology, with its emphasis on interrelationships between species, works well for these organizations.

Members of the animal rights, wildlife rehabilitation, environmental justice, pollution prevention, green technology, and sustainability communities have different agendas than habitat protection and wildlife management. They gravitate to ethical concepts alongside ecology that speak to their distinct needs, e.g., sentience, compassion, rights, justice, care, precaution, and so on.

Because Leopold’s influence is largely restricted to the traditional conservation agencies and ngos, interpretations of the meaning and significance of his work sometimes ossify into a comfortable recitation of what Leopold said, and not a vibrant conversation about extending, improving, or contesting its meaning. In policy contexts this takes the form of using Leopold as a gloss on conventional environmental policies, many of which were developed during the first two decades of the 1900s, and may no longer be well adapted to modern times.

I was reminded of this last night while attending a seminar on “Deer, Forests and the People Who Love Them” by Tom Rawinski. Rawinski is a botanist working for the U.S. Forest Service on deer “overabundance” (his term), and spoke at the invitation of Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge ahead of its hunting season. The presentation was an uncritical pean to hunting, using the impact deer have on forest biodiversity as a justification for a vast enlargement of hunting on public and private lands in suburban landscapes. Sure enough, this traditional conservation approach was peppered with cursory references to Leopold and his land ethic.

Were we to take Leopold’s insight on ethics and policy seriously, we would first have to admit that public hunting by humans is an inefficient instrument, and is no substitute for proper land management and reestablishing predator-prey dynamics. We would also have to acknowledge the real public safety concerns of weekend warriors mucking about suburban neighborhoods with lethal weapons in hand. We would have to grapple with the financial and personal conflicts of interest that hunters and their wildlife agencies have in maintaining artificially high populations in deer herds. And we would have to think about the well-being of the deer themselves, not simply as a herd or species, but as sapient beings who are members of the moral community of life that we share.

I am not against public hunting per se, but in suburban contexts a more sound and ethically viable policy should be deployed. In the short term, use immuno-contraception and sharpshooters to manage local deer overpopulation. In the long term, establish linkages between isolated habitat that can support the restoration of natural predator-prey dynamics. In the meantime, tighten the firearms training requirements for public hunting to better ensure public safety. We might also wish to address the deficit of ecological knowledge in the hunting community, who frequently and erroneously believe human beings maintain the balance of nature. Finally, we should encourage community education and planning efforts on how to live with wildlife.

Public hunts are a band-aid to ethical and sustainable relationships between people and wildlife. Instead of scapegoating deer for biodiversity problems of our own making, Leopold’s land ethic encourages us to find lasting solutions by dynamically balancing the well being of people, animals and the rest of nature. How we do this will vary from species to species, and across different landscapes. It will involve a variety of approaches, some of which may include but certainly cannot depend upon public hunts.

So, back to Green Fire. Whether Leopold and his legacy can be relevant to contemporary issues in ethics and environmental policy remains to be seen. Managing deer through hunting is a case in point. I certainly believe it can be relevant, assuming we admit to it’s ecological delimitations, and use the land ethic in partnership with other moral insights. It will be interesting to see if the film can move the traditional interpretation of Leopold outside it’s comfort zone.