Page 24 - Black Range Naturalist, April 2020
P. 24

   were throughout the United States, he felt the person with the best view of life on the forest was the ranger who worked the land every day and didn’t spend their time in the confines of an office. Only their best judgement and input could ensure success in a broad-scale conservation effort.
One other topic that is
seen throughout
Leopold’s early
thinking is the need to
manage the land well.
But his main goal here
was not the
preservation of every
cog and wheel, that thinking came later, but that of game management. He still pushed the need for predator elimination, and it was only in the early 1930’s that he started to shift his thinking and realized that predators played an important part in the natural world. One of his “Pine Cone” commentaries from January 1914 commented on a story the newsletter carried about Ranger Elliot Barker killing four bobcats and four mountain lions over a few days.
Leopold’s comment was, “some shooting”.
It was during this hiatus in Leopold’s career that an event occurred causing great joy in both families: on October 22, 1913, Estella gave birth to their first child, Aldo Starker Leopold. It was still another four months before the doctor would allow Leopold to travel back to New Mexico. He wrote to Regional Forester Ringland that his health was improving but was “slow as all get out.”
On September 14, 1914, Leopold was finally reinstated back with the Forest Service. In the sixteen and a half months of being on medical leave, his world had shifted from contentment on the porch at Mia Casita overlooking the broad upper Rio Grande valley and being the Carson Forest Supervisor to a more sedate role as Assistant Director in Region 3’s Office of Grazing. But his chaffing at idleness was over. He was back to work.
Estella Bergere and Aldo Leopold - December 7, 1910. (Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service under provision of this Creative Commons License.)
      Science, Dec. 4, 2019 - “Even 50-Year-Old Climate Models 
 Correctly Predicted Global Warming”
Climate Change and Coronavirus (Covid-19)
Oh no, he isn’t going to blame the Covid-19 pandemic on climate change is he? Nope.



Of the two issues, climate change is the more complex and devastating, but Covid-19 is more immediate and direct - and thus resonates viscerally with many more. But the
differences and similarities between the two are instructive from a systems perspective.
The biology of a virus and its hosts is much more direct and easy to understand than are the global systems which are changed because of the massive addition of CO2 and other gases, by humans, into the atmosphere. The changes to ocean oscillation, and the dramatic changes to weather patterns that creates, is just one of myriad “grand-scale relationships” that we, and all other species, will have to deal with over the next decades and generations.
Climate change and Covid-19 both have their deniers, notably in high places. Unluckily the deniers are not the people who will bear the brunt of these events. In a world without justice it is those who have no power who suffer the most.
Covid-19 will adversely (harshly in some cases) affect segments of our generation, but climate change will affect the planet for the rest of time. And “a planet for the rest of time” is more significant than “segments of one generation of a singular species”.
 











































































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