Vance Russell, the NFF Director of the California Program recently gave introductory remarks before a screening of the 2011 documentary film Green Fire at the University of California-Davis. The father of the National Wilderness System, wildlife management and ecological restoration, Aldo Leopold and his ideas still apply today in landscapes across the country. Below are Vance’s remarks before the film.

I have a quote above my desk by Aldo Leopold that is relatively unknown: “The bulk of all management success hinges on investments of time, forethought, skill and faith rather than investments of cash.” For me this emphasizes the need for collaboration among multiple groups and that cash is not going to resolve conservation problems.

One of the things that stood out from this well-made movie was what a lovely family Leopold had. Then I also thought what a sexy man! Or at least he was sexier than our other iconic conservation greats John Muir and Henry David Thoreau. Leopold also figured out how to reach out to a much wider audience beyond academics and conservationists through his clear prose and connecting to the heart and land.

I was asked to remark about how Leopold influenced my personal and professional life. I grew up in a farming town west of Chicago, just a couple hours south of Baraboo where Aldo Leopold had his family’s farm and a few hours NW of where he grew up along the Mississippi River. We had a family farm a little further south in Lasalle-Peru near the Illinois river. Although I wasn’t fortunate enough to grow up in a place with many natural areas, Wisconsin was rich in outdoor experiences and we frequently went west for family vacations. During the year we lived in Utah for my dad’s sabbatical, my appreciation of National Forests and Parks greatly deepened as we skied and camped nearly every weekend that year throughout the west. When I was in high school my parents gave me Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There which spurred a life-long passion and interest in the intermingling of agriculture and wild places.

One of the essays that I read over and over in that book is the now widely cited “Thinking Like a Mountain”. In it Leopold recalls a moment when he had just been posted to the Apache National Forest (now known as Apache-Sitgreaves NF) in 1909. He and several other forest rangers caught site of a wolf fording a river below the rimrock they had perched on to eat lunch. They quickly grabbed their rifles and shot the wolf and her pups. The rangers reached the wolf just as a dramatic green fire in the wolf's eyes was extinguishing. This moment for Leopold was seminal both for his value of wilderness but also for his later development of the land ethic.

Leopold saw that simple assumptions about wildlife management were not necessarily true. In the essay he says “I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.” The devastation from overabundance of deer populations, due to lack of predators, not just in overgrazing of understory plants but cascading effects on other species has been noted throughout the US. He realized later that killing predators was a mistake and realizing the importance of the interdependence of all living things within an ecosystem.

I'll close my remarks with a quote from the Almanac: “What a more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and by cautious experimentation prove how it works.” I’ve tried to do this everywhere I live. Everyone can learn the land ethic on a piece of land whether it is owned, borrowed, leased or volunteered. Come out to National Forests in your backyard and find out how they work.