Page 9 - Black Range Naturalist Oct 2020

European Commission's Joint Research Center, Atlas of the Human Planet 2019
through 80+ years on the planet, I can theorize and expound without excessive concern for precision of fact or for feelings of others, and I can be as negative and cynical regarding humanity as I care to be. I can be honest in my perceptions, and pessimistic in my projections.
I begin with the notion that insofar as wildlife and wild lands are concerned, humans are a destructive force that cannot be stopped. Humans justify their destruct- iveness via economic and religious arguments. But in the end, our intelligence, if it exists, and our techno- logical competence have brought us to be, quite simply, no damned good insofar as other creatures on the planet are concerned.
I'm not sure exactly when the term habitat entered the lexicon of wildlife literature. The founding textbook for the profession of American wildlife management, Game Management by Aldo Leopold, does not list the word in its index. This is not to say that Leopold didn't understand the need for habitat, but he dealt with it in other words — food, water, cover, and juxtaposition of these. The word evolution doesn't appear in Leopold's text either, and evolutionary process and habitat are deeply intertwined concepts. But Leopold was trained as a forester, an agriculturist, and in the 1920s and early 1930s, the evolutionary synthesis had not quite reached applied biology, and we do not know exactly what Leopold thought of evolutionary theory at this time. But he often wrote with confidence on things he understood poorly, perhaps using writing as I am using it here to focus ideas. He was more confident than I about human abilities to learn, change, and to accommodate other denizens of the earth. After he wrote Game Management, his ecological understanding broadened. His opus, Sand County Almanac, published posthumously, made him a guru for modern environmentalists, few of whom know about the tortuous
mental route he followed in reaching his ultimate philosophy.
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