1.1 Re-Introducing Aldo Leopold with Indigenous Land Acknowledgments

Aldo Leopold’s parents were first cousins, both children of nineteenth-century U.S. immigrants from Germany. In 1887 Leopold was born in Burlington, Iowa. This city and state were founded by taking ancestral and historic lands upon which many Indigenous Nations depended, including the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (Lakota), and to which, in the eighteenth-century, the allied oθaakiiwaki‧hina‧ki (Sauk) & Meškwahki·aša·hina (Fox) had arrived after being forced from Eastern Woodland Culture areas to the north and east.Footnote ¹⁷ U.S. genocidal forces had disrupted Indigenous ecologies and societies to pave the way for European settlement barely a generation before Leopold’s own forebears’ arrived.

In 1909, Leopold graduated from the new Yale Forest School, occupying customary lands of several more Algonquin-speaking Peoples, including Mohegan and Peekwot. That same year, he began his career as a forest and game manager for the United States Forest Service in the U.S.-dominated and denominated Territories of Arizona and New Mexico. While these two would become new States in 1912, they are the countries of dozens of other First Nations, including tribes of Navajo, Apache, and many Pueblos. Each has their own history of prior centuries of Spanish colonization, of Mexican independence, and/or U.S. expansion, removals, and dismemberments. Near the southwestern forests where Leopold worked children and grandchildren of African slaves lived. One of the U.S. Army’s segregated Black regiments, called “Buffalo Soldiers,” were stationed to the south at Fort Huachuca, near the Arizona-Mexico border, entangled in border fights including against Apache and Pancho Villa (Savoy, 2016: 142–147). It was from within this geography that Leopold helped define the “wilderness idea” in the U.S. and establish the “Gila Wilderness Area,” the first official wilderness in the U.S. forest system.

In 1924, Leopold moved his family to Madison, Wisconsin. Nine years later, his formative Game Management textbook was published and he was hired at the University of Wisconsin, where he taught until his death in 1948. Far longer than “Madison” had occupied the area, this geography has been homelands of the Hoocąk Nation and/or many others, including, the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, the oθaakiiwaki‧hina‧ki & Meškwahki·aša·hina, the Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo), the Myaamia (Miami), and the nearby Bodwéwadmi (Potawatomi) and the Oma͞eqnomenew-ahkew (Menominee).Footnote ¹⁸ This is the area within which Leopold conceived the book that became A Sand County Almanac.

In Part I of A Sand County Almanac – the culmination of his lifetime of work, published post-humously in 1949 – Leopold shared stories of personal land encounters between 1935 and the mid-1940s. These occurred as he with his family tried “to rebuild” (Reference Leopold1949: viii) a worn-out settler-farm near Madison, in Baraboo, Wisconsin. In Part II, “Sketches Here and There,” Leopold discussed ways the U.S. mainstream industrial-capitalist culture – from Lenapehoking Manhattan to Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit the Artic Refuge’s Coastal Plain (and beyond) – was “out of step” with a “conservation” focus. The geographical scope of the book broadened in this section, and the tone became more straightforwardly argumentative. In Part III, “The Upshot,” Leopold presented a philosophical inquiry that links “the land ethic” and “land health” – presumably adaptable to any landscape – and, central to my own book, Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey. Leopold most succinctly and famously defined the scientifically informed ethical “right” in land-use as that which “tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community” (Leopold, Reference Leopold1949: 224).

At every step in his career, though not acknowledging it with the respect justice calls for, Leopold is treading on and writing about Native land.

1.2 Rescoping Personal Responsibility

But then the same is true of all of us white settlers. As I critique and rejoinder Leopold’s writings, I do likewise to my own as author of Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey: Rediscovering the Author of A Sand County Almanac. In my book, “odyssey” refers to the development of Leopold’s scientific and normative concept of “land health,” to which his famous “land ethic” points. It also references Leopold’s essay “Odyssey,” which portrays the “ecological odyssey” of life in a give-and-take of energy and chemicals intersecting with an “evolutionary odyssey” in a succession of life, organizing and complexifying, along a rolling arrow of time (2016: 12). I retain all of these senses of “odyssey” in this Element, adding in aspects of my own journey. I also stress how these three facets are encapsulated in my own book and are woven together with oppressive, including genocidal as well as eugenic, assumptions. For instance, woven with assumptions that Indigenous people, if human beings at all, are inferior ones compared with dominating norms, are already gone; or, inevitably and/or by design will soon disappear. Again, I am surfacing such grave narrative troubles, in detail, in order to refuse and rejoinder white supremacist settler colonialism. I do so in support of decolonization and of abolition, that is in support of deeply revisioned, intersectional, ontological, narrative, and structural change “defying a [mere] liberal-to-reactionary (white/multiculturalist) common sense” (Rodríguez, Reference Rodríguez2019: 1578), which would merely allow the simplistic, familiar, realistic, and/or ideological to trump what is necessary. This is what I mean by the verb “unsettling” in the title of my Element.

I have long been a student of Aldo Leopold’s maturing ideas about land-human relationships. This is evident in the care I took writing my book. In both the 2006 and 2016 editions of Odyssey, however, I left out the above acknowledgments and much else. Odyssey was first written as my PhD dissertation after a ten-year span between degree programs. On Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey’s tenth anniversary, it was republished under my new name, coming after my divorce and a new marriage, in a still ongoing journey to liberation. The divorce, occurring alongside my doctoral graduation, also involved alienation from the totalizing religious culture on which I had submissively imprinted for more than thirty years. My entire support system, like the first marriage, fell to pieces. This shattering had been precipitated by an all-too-familiar and ever-unique story – enmeshment with a man experienced at psychological and sexual grooming, a smart and, I thought, more progressive person and leading academic whom I had trusted as my advisor.Footnote ¹⁹ The personal and professional fragmentation, over time and involving much (ongoing) healing work, paradoxically, has turned out to include a gift of (also ongoing) release from my former untenable worldview at the intersection of religious fundamentalism and both U.S. conservative and liberal slants on heteropatriarchy.

I had and still have a lot to un/learn and worlds to re/orient to. My new Preface to the 2016 anniversary edition of Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey highlighted aspects of Leopold’s work made more salient by awareness of global climate change alongside “not only an industrialized, but an increasingly human-populated, class-divided, and urbanized planet” (xxi), as I then put it. And, relatedly, the provocative, best-selling climate change author and dynamic movement builder Bill McKibben, who was a Leopold admirer, generously contributed a Foreword. Leopold, McKibben said, “was clearly interested in wilderness.” At the same time, McKibben emphasized that Leopold’s “land health” ideal, the focus of my book, “was a quieter vision of the world, and perhaps a more radical one” than his interest in wilderness indicated. Leopold, did, after all, come to recognize, McKibben notes, that “there was no way to wall man off from the rest of the world” (Warren, Reference Warren2016: xi).

Leopold saw his own ethical work as a radical pursuit – to “the roots of the problem” (Leopold, Reference Leopold1993: 157) – of a conservation, culminating in land health, that involved doctoring (Callicott and Freyfogle, Reference Callicott and Freyfogle1999: 220; see also Leopold, Reference Leopold1933: 411; Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 288) an “environmental fracture,” a conceptual division of “man” and “nature,” in the terms of the Caribbean political philosopher Malcolm Ferdinand. Leopold was working out this sort of mending, however, merely within his and my own culture’s extractive worldview, which encompassed ongoing utilitarian forms of U.S. conservation that severed nature into parts, caste away some parts as useless while profiting from others deemed “resources,” and educated students’ intellects without nurturing affection for land.

Throughout his career, Leopold tried out various angles in pursuit of solving root problems, preferring positive or constructive ones (e.g., Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 345), both in his writing and as an organizer and educator. For instance, in the 1910s, Leopold, serving in USFS District 3, was put in charge of coordinating a new fish and game program. He did award-winning work, traveling across his region of the Southwest supporting the organization of new game protective associations with the ideal to “restore to every citizen his inalienable right to know and love wild things of his native land” (Warren, Reference Warren2016: 87). While serving for a short time as secretary of the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce, Leopold organized a city tree-planting campaign. He hoped it would not only restore appropriate plants to the community but help unite factions problematic, he thought, to achieving a common cause of a good place to live. Later, in Wisconsin, Leopold incentivized “Coon Valley” farmers as private landowners to work for the “mutually advantageous” public interest in land use (Callicott and Freyfogle, Reference Callicott and Freyfogle1999: 164; Lin, Reference Lin2014; Warren, Reference Warren2016: 155). As he came to the final year of his life, Leopold became one of several founding advisors to the Conservation Foundation, an organization intending to promote “worldwide democratice peace and ecological conservation” (Warren, Reference Warren2016: xxi). Leopold leaned away from “direct agitation,” though, as the group agreed that their purpose was to “maintain dignity and high professional integrity” and bring “underlying truth” into conservation education and into “objective fact-finding” research (xxvii).

Education and research, woven with the “ethos” of rhetorics or the “persona” of literature, remain potent tools for persuasion if not transformation, to be sure (Cryer, Reference Cryer2015). And, repeatedly, as we shall see, Leopold returned to a growing conviction that what was needed to bring about his land ethical ideas, at the root of roots, was an internal change in people bringing about an “ecological conscience.” Yet dignity in professionalism often translated into approaches of a certain practical caution, or “liberal-to-reactionary (white/multiculturalist) common sense” in Rodríguez’s terms, where acts of advocacy were concerned. Such caution can be a symptom of Euro-settler comfort. This is a racialized privilege, for instance, that would allow Leopold to address A Sand County Almanac to the homogenized “us” who were, by “mechanization,” “assured … of a good breakfast,” and who could afford “a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings” (1949: ix); this is the privilege that allowed the assumption that “a shift of values” was needed and not liberation from landlessness due to theft “when we took [land] over from the Indians,” continent-wide (Callicott and Freyfogle, Reference Callicott and Freyfogle1999: 162); this is the privilege that allowed his “we” to erase ongoing condonation of enslavement – of a profit-driven ethic in using people and land – in imaging that this “philosophy is dead in human relations”; this is the privilege that allowed assuming there is no other “we” than the one who has already taken “19 centuries to define decent man-to-man conduct” (albeit “only half done”) and through whom “it may take as long to evolve a code of decency for man-to-land conduct” (Flader and Callicott, 345–6; see also Leopold, Reference Leopold1993: 155). This is the particular “we” who might evolve sooner in sympathy with eugenics in multiple guises encouraging, for instance, those with a “racial inheritance” of “an interest in wildlife” (Leopold, et al., Reference Leopold, chairman, Cole, Fassett, Chancey Juday and Wagner1937: 26) as earth’s inheritors.

As I argue throughout this Element, neither Leopold nor I have been nearly radical enough or altogether not radical, when it comes to seeing and resisting white supremacist settler-colonialism woven through our own perspectives on land and people relations. Leopoldian works maintain a “colonial fracture,” in Ferdinand’s terms, sustained by Eurocentric racism and imperialism, that makes hierarchical separations between “European colonizers and non-European colonized peoples, between Whites and non-Whites, between the masters and the enslaved, between the metropole and the colonies, between the Global North and the Global South” (Reference Ferdinand2022: 4–7). And, Leopoldian narratives – from the beginning to the end of his career – maintain such structured power relations without recognizing that rooting out assumptions that some people will dominate others goes hand in hand with tending human-land relationships. And this gives pause to acknowledge that the environmental fracture became actionably salient to him, me, and many other U.S. settler conservationists when the colonial one did not. Perhaps this is because, demanding as it might be to shift settler land values, it can seem less threatening and more appealing than unsettling them.

Meanwhile, initiated by advice from his daughter, McKibben says, he prioritized leveraging his culturally privileged standing and global platform. Not responding defensively, his actions have included transitioning in July 2020 to “emeritus status” in 350.org, an influential climate organization which he co-founded, “to lower the volume” on his own influence while remaining supportive, particularly of rising generations of leadership. As, around this time, he also founded TH!RD ACT to organize aging climate justice activists to address ongoing intergenerational troubles wherein “inclusive” sounds attached to a theory of structural justice. Their principles include, for instance, that “differences of race, gender, or other markers of identity make us stronger” and that “everyone has a role” in undoing “unjust and unhealthy” societal patterns.Footnote ²⁰ McKibben began practicing not hoarding attention and “passing the mic” to those who – with their communities – are often most hazarded yet least heard by those doing the climate warming, including Native, Black and Brown persons, especially who also are women, youth, and/or LGBTQIA+, and/or disabled persons (McKibben, Reference McKibben2022).Footnote ²¹ The host of important voices to whom he has drawn attention have included Mary Annaïse Heglar and Bernadette Demientieff. Heglar is a Black woman speaking broadly as a “Public Climate Person,” in her words.Footnote ²² While a writer-in-residence at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, her challenging reflections hit home to me as I, too, had been a New Yorker living through Superstorm Sandy. I taught on the New York University faculty during the 2012 storm, which certainly laid bare worlds of inequities. This included students I knew.Footnote ²³ This, and the wider situation – people already in intersectionally precarious living situations now also facing transportation shutdowns, electricity outages and an unsafe water supply, uninhabitable homes, and other catastrophic storm losses – broke through a buffer of my own privileges.

Climate stressors rise from and magnify the injustices, oppression, and griefs perpetuated by white supremacy.Footnote ²⁴ This includes racialized non-white students assigned “staple texts” like Leopold’s Almanac, to find their lived experiences and interests “left in the dust” (Savoy, Reference Savoy2015: 33–34).Footnote ²⁵ It includes criminalization of non-white people outdoors, as in the infamous Central Park birding incident – Christian Cooper, a Black man, was birdwatching when a white woman, feeling threatened by his very presence, called the police on him.Footnote ²⁶ In 2020, reflecting on Sandy’s lessons, Heglar reiterated how climate science supports “the severity of the injustice” – that is, those contributing to climate change the least tend to suffer the most. “Sure,” she says, “but it’s not the entire story.” How will various sectors – educational, recreational, economic – lean into what sciences help point to? There’s a place, scientist or not, Heglar explains, for anyone who “understands the concept of ‘no fair.’” This “no fair,” as she stresses, includes understanding climate – really, everything connecting to land and to health – as “the Black issue it is.”Footnote ²⁷

Heglar’s “no fair” is also the Indigenous issue. I left New York, occupying Lenapehoking, for the city of Fairbanks, Alaska, on unceded ancestral lands of the lower Tanana Dene Peoples. This is where I first met Bernadette Demientieff, Gwich’yaa Zhee Gwich’in and Director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee. As noted in Section 1, the Introduction, the Committee was formed within her Nation in 1988 for defending Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit The Sacred Place Where Life Begins (in U.S. political terms, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Coastal Plain 1002 Area) against oil and gas drilling threats and for educating non-Gwich’in on their reasons to protect it. Demientieff stresses what defending this sacred land means for her: “This is not just about a wilderness,” she says. “Of course we are all interconnected up here to our land, water, and animals. And, if our animals and our land is sick then we are sick.”Footnote ²⁸ Conveying her Elders’ message, Demientieff emphasizes that she is “not an environmentalist or activist.” She is Gwich’in, and this “is not just about protecting our polar bears but this is about Indigenous voices being ignored, this is about a whole identity, about a people’s entire way of life being destroyed for profit.”Footnote ²⁹

In Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey, I developed Leopold’s critiques of dominating, harmful, profit-driven, industrial-capitalist land relationships. He evaluated such relations not only as imprudent but also as ethically “wrong.” As a rejoinder, he offered a positive narrative of a necessary transition to “right” and healthful human-land relationships. This narrative, still considered radical or visionary, or at least crucial, by numbers of scholars and/or conservationists, was based in evolutionary and ecological science. Furthermore, Leopold’s evidence-based knowledge was entwined with “love and respect” for self-organizing, regenerative communities of soils, waters, air, plants, and animals, including humans, at least some of us. In Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey, I went to great lengths to detail how Leopold, characteristically teachable and curious, both refused or otherwise unlearned some settler-conventional ways to imagine land and learned some new ways to see it. In this regard, for example, he shifted from participation in U.S. wolf-elimination projects to supporting their rightful and functional membership within the land community, if not on equal footing with learned conservationists as intelligent teachers themselves and beings to be thanked (Simpson, Reference Simpson2014; Fix et al., Reference Fix, Burnam and Gutteriez2019; Van Horn, et al., Reference Van Horn, Kimmerer and Hausdoerffer2021). The “biotic pyramid” symbol Leopold helped detail replaces what he deemed a less-apt balancing scale image. His proposed “mental image” portrays land as a “fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals,” albeit wherein “Indians” were replaced by “farmers,” as superior human animals. Moreover, “wilderness,” Leopold claimed, was the “most perfect norm” by which to evaluate the healthy functioning of a human-inhabited land’s “biotic pyramid.” Wilderness protection, Leopold also argued, should be a common ground for scientists and recreationalists at odds on other points within settler-colonial society (Warren, Reference Warren, Nelson and Callicott2008).

“Wilderness,” written conceptually and politically on the ground, is a known site of racialized danger and relational disruptions as so many persons continue expounding (Merchant, Reference Merchant1989; Denevan,Reference Denevan1992; Cronon, Reference Cronon1996; Catton, Reference Catton1997; Spence Reference Spence1999; Nelson and Callicott, Reference Nelson and Callicott2008; Whyte, Reference Whyte2018a; Gomez et al., Reference Gomez, Guardiola and Ybarra2018; Ferdinand, Reference Ferdinand2022; Sharkey, Reference Sharkey2023; Dawson et al., Reference Dawson and Longo2023).Footnote ³⁰ Wilderness is a place where Black persons continue to be vulnerable to violence by white persons. It is an ongoing act of boundary-making with rippling consequences to Lands’ Native Peoples, disrupting customary and historic ecologies and threatening collective continuance. As a concept by and for largely able-bodied Euro-colonizers, “wilderness” cancels the all-too-real and still-unfolding histories of the U.S. government’s murderous and otherwise forcible removals and assimilations of Indigenous people to appropriate their homelands.

This colonialist activity engaged Leopold’s first employer, the United States Forest Service, and Leopold himself. Leopold did encompass human beings in his ecological-ethical concept of land health. Referring to wilderness as its best comparative norm, however, is only one of the ways in which his ideas of land community membership were exclusive. It is important to repeat that Leopold’s works expressing intentions to repair a human-land fracture not only do not themselves represent nor inherently translate into just, anti-racist, decolonial, and/or abolishionist relational mending. As we shall see in further detail, his narratives are woven with colonialist white supremacy and attendant structures of authority. Thus, subsequent well-meaning efforts at diversity and inclusivity, for instance, by the Aldo Leopold Foundation, The Land Institute, The Society for Conservation Biology, the IUCN, in policies like the U.S. Wilderness Act, or in books like my Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey and Last Great Wilderness by Roger Kaye, and any other small to vast institutions, movements, policies, writings, research, or agendas attached to Leopoldian norms – without tending the colonial fracture still throbbing within them – unfortunately, would be prone to reinscribe their offenses.

It follows that it is crucial to continue alert so as not to mistake the adaptation of a colonialist word, scheme, and/or legal tool for the most apt tool for environmental justice and rightful Indigenous access to sacred sites. For instance, the Gwich’in Nation’s resolution, Gwich’in Niinstyaa, calls on the U.S. government to designate the so-called 1002 area of the Arctic Refuge a “Wilderness” in order to protect the Porcupine Caribou calving grounds, “for generations to come,” land that will never stop being Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit The Sacred Place Where Life Begins.Footnote ³¹ “Wilderness” may be the best available of “sites of interaction,” in Whyte’s terms, (Reference Whyte2014: 3) – if not a conceptual, a political sphere the Gwich’in find of use against the threat of big oil extraction. Yet, any policy not incorporating “Indigenous conceptions of relationality,” as Gilio-Whitaker discusses, “will ultimately reproduce relationships of [colonialist] domination” (Reference Gilio-Whitaker2019: 145; Warren, Reference Warren, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2024). Addressing those interested in “continental scale conservation,” Neets’aii Gwich’in Elder, Doctor, and Reverend Trimble Gilbert, for instance, “reminds us that before his homeland was overlain with the Western refuge-wilderness-conservation ideology,” the Gwich’in have had their own successful relationships and place-based worldview that “underpins the Gwich’in peoples’ strident efforts to protect the Refuge’s coastal plain as Wilderness, and their expanding advocacy for just and sustainable environmental policies” (Kaye et al., Reference Kaye, Andrews, Demientieff and Carron2021; Warren, Reference Warren, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2024).

At an expandingly global scale, Leopold himself and we who have followed in his footsteps might find ourselves thinking we substantially agree with the 2021 “Marseille Manifesto: A People’s Manifesto for the Future of Conservation,” co-created by many Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists and experts worldwide. It calls out “a model of conservation” that Leopold also worked against, one contributing to rather than thwarting biodiversity loss due to “the rampant expansion of a growth-oriented industrial economy” valuing land and its life as capital. How many Leopoldian conservationists, though, are working for a “complete halt in the creation of new Protected Areas, which exclude Indigenous and local communities,” including in U.S. wilderness policies? How many of us refuse to embark “on any conservation projects without the full Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) of the communities concerned”? How many know proper protocol for and prioritize “concrete plans for reparations of past wrongs, including through transferring control back to the historical and local guardians”? (Dawson, et al., Reference Dawson and Longo2023: 229). And how many shall continue responsibly listening for how expressions of extinction, climate, and any other land-based crisis, “like every contemporary crisis, has more to do with justice, with structural violence and racism, with land theft, and with colonialism than with what we, in the Global North call ‘environment,’ ‘climate,’ and ‘nature”? (Longo in Dawson, et al., Reference Dawson and Longo2023: 7).

In both editions of Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey, as I have begun to see, I represented white settler-colonialist ontologies and repeated histories that hide atrocities and suppress and disrupt Indigenous knowledges and ecologies. By such complicitous repetitions I helped perpetuate a legacy of violent actions in the present. This story, not unique to me, illustrates how critiquing for-profit capitalism (or commodifying socialism, for that matter) in land valuations, as important as it is, is not enough. Acts of surfacing deep structures of power relations are needed to reveal the linkages of even the most well-meaning ventures – including within conservation, including within Leopoldian narratives – with U.S. white supremacist settler-colonialism – its genocides, forced assimilations, land thefts, and essential slave labor (Warren, Reference Warren2016: 171, 443fn85; Demuth, Reference Demuth2019).

I concluded Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey as a history of transformational conservation work begun by Leopold but left undone at his death. For me, at the time, land health was the dynamic ideal to which his land ethic pointed along with so many challenges ahead to enact it. Between 2006 and 2016, as I note in the Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Edition, I felt all the more clearly how shifting contexts and new understandings must alter my own work as well. Throughout that decade I had become deeply engaged, via 350.org and the broadening fossil fuel divestment movement, in intergenerational community organizing for system change. As a faculty member, this had meant becoming a better listener to youth, and for several years I was active in co-constituting my relations with students, both in classrooms and in climate justice actions. That decade’s experiences had also made different points in Leopold’s works salient to me. For example, in that 2016 Preface, it seemed important to note Leopold’s historic advisory role in launching the Conservation Foundation, because they later convened one of the earliest conferences on anthropogenic climate change. Leopold’s insight, during a world war, that “many conservation problems heretofore local will shortly become global,” appeared all the more relevant in the twenty-first century (Warren, Reference Warren2016: xxiv). I was compelled to explore how Leopold’s ecological concept of land – the land health focus of Odyssey – might remain germane, since it was not only temporally dynamic but also “spatially elastic.” His “biotic pyramid” was ever-expansionary in this emerging view. It linked naturally from local to world-wide scales and from fossil hydrocarbons underground to soils and industrial emissions of global atmospheric carbon bringing on global warming (xxx–xxxiv). Nowhere, even in this later edition, did I directly locate and face menacing projections of exclusionary white supremacy and ecologies-laminating settler colonialism, including within Leopoldian narratives.

There are signs that I searched for indications that Leopold might have become increasingly concerned about oppressed people, if not seeing the intersection of conservation troubles with colonial structures, and justice. For instance, I noted that Leopold had penciled in “Labor Unions” as another potential group to enlist in possible political action in the margin of a Conservation Foundation discussion document alongside “rotary, 4-H, Boy Scouts, chambers of commerce, and women’s federations” (xxvii). In this document, which framed the organization’s educational- and research-based purpose, I was sure to list some of their “fact-finding” interests, including the “protection needs of endangered fauna, flora, wilderness of varying degrees, and indigenous people” (xxviii). These interests not only did not speak to justice and respect but remain offensively objectifying, dehumanizing, and patronizing. Nor did I note that Leopold was directly supportive of the works of other Foundation associates, such as conservationist authors Bill Vogt and Henry Fairfield Osborn, Jr., who were more outspoken in making Malthusian and/or eugenic proposals. The closest I got to linking environmental and colonial fractures was probably in recognizing that those “least responsible for escalating troubles” (xxxv) were suffering first and most.

Along similar lines, I made my own apparently subconscious moves to innocence (Tuck and Yang, Reference Tuck and Yang2012), on behalf of my cultural ancestor, Leopold, and myself. For instance, I am alarmed to see that, in joining quotes from two sources, I made it sound as if Leopold was not only noticing but also encouraging “people of ’suppressed’ traditions” to “’throw your weight around’” in conservation matters. This smacks of my own white arrogance, presumption, and privilege (Warren, Reference Warren2016: xxvii). Additionally, I preempted what Leopold actually had written in his unpublished draft titled “Ecology as an Ethical System.”Footnote ³² “Other races, now suppressed,” he had said, “might have somewhat different behavior patterns” than those of “the races now dominant.” I had replaced Leopold’s word “race” with “tradition.” This switch of guises revealed my own discomfort with facing the underlying terms of inequitable power relations. It pointed to my uneasiness at the vexing implications of a sweeping proposal that the conservation profession be about changing land-ruining people into land ethical ones (see also, e.g., Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 280). It avoided raising questions about who needed to change (or not) and how. His attempt in this draft to reckon, in historic and evolutionary time scales, with mutable or immutable human social components and variations in races that were dominant or suppressed while proposing the role of conservation as “routing the world’s traffic,” remained incomplete and confusing. Yet I had bypassed an overall framing that leaned toward more overtly popular eugenics (Prum, Reference Prum2017), with which he too engaged, as well as Malthusian population control. These tendencies, too, need unearthing in order to refuse re-inventing their oppressions.

To draw out one more example of my complicity, I made a particularly glaring reprise of harmful arrogance in the conclusion to the 2016 Preface of Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey. In the 1940s, Leopold had called for a “new kind of [land-health-minded] people”Footnote ³³ Uncritically, I followed his example to propose “a new name for this offshoot of our own evolving species: Homo generativus” followed by a presumptuous, homogenizing, assimilative “We” (Warren, Reference Warren2016: xxxv). Along with more cringe-worthy hubris, implicit in that sentence is the ongoing erasures of distinct, ancient and still-living Indigenous Peoples, from whom lands have been stolen, and Black and Brown people, stolen from homelands worldwide. Yet more. In my academic training and in my own academic work, I have learned and propagated the institutionalized erasures of these erasures in settler-colonial storytelling. Meanwhile, many Indigenous cultures have long proven what to Leopold and I remained merely wishful thinking, that “they have no need of the word ‘conservation’” because they already “have the thing itself” (Callicott and Freyfogle, Reference Callicott and Freyfogle1999: 172). Nor, it seems, do all systems and all Peoples require transformation so much as liberation.

I am responsible for doing better. My doing better means learning first how to listen (and how not to listen, i.e., extractively). My doing better includes commitments to go yet deeper and wider into my birth-culture’s dominating – and routinely buried – rooted white supremacist and colonialist assumptions.Footnote ³⁴ Oppressive assumptions of one-way authority have long structured relationships bearing injustice while undermining conditions of health and flourishing. Many remain still potently embedded in U.S. conservation, including its Leopoldian legacies. Still, Heglar holds space for anyone in the climate movement who “understands the concept of ‘no fair.’” Demientieff is likewise generous: “we [Gwich’in] don’t only think about … our people,” she says, but also of “our human race” and “the many American people who deserve a chance at survival.”Footnote ³⁵ However, to leave out Heglar’s summons to see climate as “the Black issue it is” and Demientieff’s mustering non-Gwich’in to “stand with the Gwich’in Nation,” and not the other way around, would be to not hear them.

2.1 Methodology: Good Conversations with Ancestors

At a glance, it might seem a faster route to reparative justice, abolitionist and decolonial futures to turn the white supremacist settler-colonial eraser around on my work and that of my forebears, including Leopold’s.Footnote ³⁷ Yet, as Robert Pogue Harrison brings to life in his Dominion of the Dead, deleting our culture-bearers could no more be done than canceling our birth parents. Each of us is layered with some heritage/s of shared assumptions and values that also define any norms of “virtue” and organize social institutions, including the institutions of conservation (Harrison, Reference Harrison2003: ix; Gilio-Whitaker, Reference Gilio-Whitaker2019: 92–95). What else could explain our existences, whether we acknowledge ourselves and ancestors or not?Footnote ³⁸ And how, other than owning offences, can any of us reckon and do better?

Only in rare cases might a person or heritage be so abusive as to not have some brightness, including ourselves as human beings who wish to live on. At the moment our wish occurs, so does the certainty of our eventual death. As much as we might try to delay that certainty, the return to the company of our dead is inevitable. We can hardly escape them. But this does not necessarily lock rising generations into rote repetition of ancestral proposals. On the contrary, by facing them and disrupting our own willful ignorance, rising generations can make choices. By learning how to listen on the way to understanding, a way of respect, we can choose with care. Otherwise, we walk down a one-way street of hagiography or narcissistic authority – dead to living, elder to younger, colonizer to colonized, human to more-than-human. Driven on this way – perhaps like the insatiable monster Windigo whom mother, scientist-educator, author, and enrolled Citizen Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer describes in her Anishinaabe tradition (2013: 303–309) – deadends in the abuses of dominance. Listeners, however, can hear into the rapaciousness many settler predecessors have preferred to keep hidden. This includes the wide-reaching logics of “settler-native-slave triad” that erases its own tracks while leaving structures intact that erode land and violently eliminate Black and Native Peoples (Tuck and Yang, Reference Tuck and Yang2012: 18; Dotson, Reference Dotson2018: 195). Listeners can bring the secreted up to the surface – within U.S. conservation and in other environmental and social arenas – and thus un/learn and take responsibility.

2.2 Avowing Solidarity to Refuse Hegemony: A Method of Anti/Colonialist-Indigenous Narrative Comparisons

As part of his intellectual and ethical development, Leopold grew aware of power-diminishing fragmentation within the U.S. conservation movement in his lifetime. For example, he wrote about inner-conservation conflicts between sustained-yield foresters, ecological researchers, recreationists, and hunters (e.g., Warren, Reference Warren2016: 104–105, 349). In addition to helping lead Leopold to perceive land elements as interconnected, the need to respect the differences in land-use emphases led him to try coalition-building. He thus did not urge merging “organizations so much as rationales for preserving wilderness” (Warren, Reference Warren, Nelson and Callicott2008: 99). Perhaps a society at constant odds with itself might come together in the search for a wilderness-informed, shared “durable scale of values.” Returning to this arena now, yet again, there may be much in Leopold’s legacy to avow. At the same time, the ideas of shared values and coalitions of interests raise questions of how best to orient within “differences that make a difference” (Ruíz and Dotson, Reference Ruíz and Dotson2017: 2, 13). Moreover, any good renewals of ancestral proposals of solidarity must first reckon with their context of settler-colonial white supremacy including manifest destiny.

If there is any chance of creating coalitions durable enough to support meaningful, just climate and land protection, Leopoldian conservationists cannot mistake Heglar’s and Demientieff’s generous care for others as an excuse to forget that these land issues are Black and Indigenous issues. Again, it calls for Black feminisms philosopher Kristie Dotson’s keeping in focus “politics of elimination” of “settler-slave-native relations” (Dotson, Reference Dotson2018: 195). To make good relations, in other words, as Quechua descendant and collaborative researcher Andrea Vásquez-Fernández and Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation member and Canada Research Chair Cash Ahenakew pii tai poo taa (flying eagle) write, potential non-Indigenous allies and accomplices with Indigenous Peoples will acknowledge the “incommensurability of clashing ‘notions’” (Reference Vásquez-Fernández2020: 65–70). We will cease privileging “Western” paradigms like “sustainable development” that reproduce settler-colonial exploitation of “Mother Earth,” of Native lands, and that lead to the genocides of Indigenous Peoples and more of non-dominating identities. Those calls seem applicable to traditional land-relational English-language terms such as “conservation” itself, “environmentalism,” and “wilderness protection,” and, as an ongoing reminder, regarding uses of “climate justice” and even “just transition.” These authors also stress attending to “the limitations of what we cannot imagine from our entrenched westernized frames of reference and/or intercultural equivocality” (65). More exists in “desired futures” than anyone – particularly “we” settlers – can dream up from a position within a dominating cultureFootnote ⁴³

Directly regarding Leopold’s ongoing conservation legacy, Kyle Powys Whyte specifies the need, in any attempts to bring different heritages together, to daylight underlying differences in any comparisons of Leopoldian ethical orientations and Indigenist ones (Reference Whyte, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2015, Reference Whyte, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2024). He explains that while there is the chance of convergence of insights from distinct origins, such cannot be determined without paying close attention to differences among “notions” and the challenges of translation. Here, too, such crucial differences, especially if left buried, will fester into ongoing suppression, violence, and bad history (Whyte, personal communication, 2021). These hidden differences would undermine chances for any genuine and sustainable Indigenous-settler-conservationist coalitions.

With this in mind, I return to Whyte’s three pithy issues of deep Leopoldian-Indigenist comparisons that “must be reckoned with” (Reference Whyte, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2015: 2, Reference Whyte, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2024). This would be on the way to bringing P/people(s) together around any genuinely complementary if not commensurate land-ethical orientations. One troubling difference is that Leopold’s morally ascendant narrative of “all history” (Reference Leopold1949: 200) is partial, biased, and unsound. It is “the exact reverse” ethical unfolding experienced by many Native Peoples by force of colonization (Whyte, Reference Whyte, Rawlinson and Ward2015: 13, Reference Whyte, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2024). This includes acknowledging a brutal irony. Leopold’s tale indifferently imposes settler-colonial guilt and possible self-redemption on many Indigenous Peoples. While settler-colonialists ourselves – including via Leopold’s land health vision – are guilty of systemically obstructing Indigenous ecologies and collective continuance and often with “negative environmental consequences” (Whyte, Reference Whyte, Rawlinson and Ward2015: 13) for everyone. For instance, continual threats to some 370 million Indigenous persons who “live on 22 percent of the world’s land surface” also threaten “about 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity” (Sobrevila, Reference Sobrevila2008: xii). Life is tied to these lands and with Indigenous ethics and “knowledge systems” already composed with “anti-colonial action” and “critical feedback loops” (Whyte, Reference Whyte, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2024).

Another problem, following Whyte, are the differences between how Leopold (and those decision-makers, institutions, and policies shaped by Leopold’s concepts) and various Indigenous Tribes and First Nations enact(ed) their land-relational norms. This matter involves delving into settler presumptions of theoretical ethical similarities, in the abstract, that turn out to be dissimilar or even incommensurable ethics in practice (Tuck and Yang, Reference Tuck and Yang2012; Whyte, Reference Whyte, Rawlinson and Ward2015, Reference Whyte, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2024). For example, as Whyte discusses, whereas Leopold’s words and some of his projects challenge commodification, his home and work ventures do not model re-structured power relations nor economic and justice-determined changes. On the other hand, Anishinaabe women elders’ Mother Earth Water Walk enacts responsibilities to water that are “part and parcel of maintaining family/kin, community and ceremonial relationships across species” (Whyte, Reference Whyte, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2024). And, in courageously demonstrating their culture’s self-organization of reciprocal responsibilities, the Walk effectively re-sets unjust configurations of the dominating settler state (Whyte Reference Whyte, Rawlinson and Ward2015, Reference Whyte, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2024).

A third comparison is between an epistemological framework that vests authority in Leopold’s land ethic and other channels that represent equitable dependence upon Indigenous knowledge systems (e.g., for decision-making), on their Peoples’ own terms. In Whyte’s analysis, privileging Leopoldian land-ethical norms, such as land health rooted in a wilderness concept, as the host or “translator of Indigenous ethics” can “grant unsubstantiated and even offensive privilege” (Reference Whyte, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2015: 2–3, Reference Whyte, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2024). As we will see, prioritizing the land ethic legacy sanctions ongoing colonial “cruelty,” which settlers ourselves know (Merchant, Reference Merchant1989; Cronon, Reference Cronon1996: 15), toward Indigenous Peoples, undermining their sovereignties, also so-inflicting Black and Brown and more who are marginalized.

All three of Whyte’s comparisons ask, more generally, who gets to decide? Who, with what values, is procedurally suppressed (in advance) in decision-making processes, and who benefits from the suppression? Further, what can we learn from potentially reciprocal (e.g., epistemic, intergenerational, ancestral, kinship) land ethical dependencies? Broadly, these comparisons keep in focus, for the sake of refusing and reciprocally rejoindering, the U.S. settler agenda of (1) human relegations – forcible removals and/or dispossessions of Indigenous Peoples, Black persons, Latinas/os, and more racialized as non-white (that is, as in the way) from/ lands, including by murder, abduction, relocation, and moving political boundaries; (2) “resource” appropriations” – thefts of land and waters and elements extracted from them, also pilfering alluring elements of colonized cultures to benefit empire; and 3) forced assimilations of P/people/s to “the” norms of (already privileged) “white” (Euro-American, abled, male/heteropatriarchal) society.

3.1 Bad History: The Flip Side of Virtue

One overall and repeating narrative arc of Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, from the Foreword to the penultimate essay, “Wilderness,” and what became the final essay, “The Land Ethic,” proposes moral ascension. Settlers rise from land-conquering “pioneers” to conservationists, becoming “land doctors” for “land health,” and promoting mental and spiritual health by expanding land community-mindedness. Leopold imagines a scheme, in Whyte’s incisive words, that “will redeem Euro-American people from the historical destruction of the environment that they have caused” (Whyte, Reference Whyte, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2024). And Leopold nonchalantly imposes his colonizing narrative even on abducted and enslaved Black persons, Native Land citizens, Latinas/os living “goodlife” relations (Ybarra, Reference Ybarra2016), folded into that historical destruction, by violent tactics of relegation, appropriation, and assimilation.

In the Foreword to his best-selling book, Leopold introduces himself as part of (an already warm and well-fed) minority – those who prefer “wild things” over “progress” (Leopold, Reference Leopold1949: vii–ix). Mainstream progress is defined as an increasing pile of money and the “material blessings” it buys, including televisions and multiple bathtubs, as well as land as “property.” “Wild things” encompass winds, sunsets, geese, and pasque flowers. In “Wilderness” (188–201), Leopold reinforces his arguments on behalf of these “things” beyond human re/creation – as he had since the start of his career under the influence of Hornaday. In “Wilderness,” Leopold urges reasons for protecting “the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization” (188). In his narrative, the wilderness-conquering pioneer turns anvil-pounding laborer coming into a moment of “repose.” In this repose, the builders of civilization should appreciate the “raw material” they are made of while there is still any remaining, Leopold writes. Civilized persons need not view “wilderness” as an “adversary,” Leopold proposes. Pioneers turned laborers able to have some leisure and desiring adventure, as well as material provisions, would do well to appreciate all remaining sizes and degrees of “wildness” (189) as “something to be loved and cherished, because it gives definition and meaning to [their] life” (188).

As we have seen, cherishing more-than-human-lives was something Leopold and Hornaday maintained agreement on even while disagreeing on how best to protect wildlife and wildlife habitat, including the larger most “wild” wilderness regions supporting big carnivores like grizzly bears (Hornaday Reference Hornaday1913: 156; Leopold Reference Leopold1949: 198). Likewise, Leopold continued resonating with Hornday’s “racial animus” (Cryer, Reference Cryer2015: 500) in ways that would forcefully and unjustly assimilate Indigenous people into settler “pioneer” narratives of land protective or ethical behavior which was to relegate them from their own lands, disrupting traditions of kinship responsibilities. For instance, Hornaday in his 1913 Vanishing Wildlife wrote that “The Indian should have no game advantages whatever over a white man” (176). He called for “Indians,” many with treaties promising hunting rights, to “obey the general game laws, just the same as white men” (176, also Cryer, Reference Cryer2015: 499). And Leopold’s early-career game protective work in the U.S. Southwest had promoted hunting restrictions that denied “customary hunting freedoms” of “Indians” (i.e., Diné/Navajo, Apache, Puebloan Peoples), whom some settlers also blamed, along with predatory wolves, for game declines (Warren, Reference Warren1993: 83; see also Leopold Reference Leopold1949: 191). As American environmental historian Louis S. Warren discusses, there was more than wildlife protection under the surface of emerging game laws. Supporters, including Leopold, proposed to enact free and democratic equity in hunting access. Yet, according to Warren, the laws also brought competing “Anglos and Hispanos” – many of the latter themselves dispossessed by U.S. treaty-breaking – into coalition “to push Indians off their lands” and appropriate them, including into conservation’s hands (Reference Warren1993: 83, 92, 94, 97).

In a conceptually similar way, decades later and not having disavowed his mentor’s racism, Leopold, the university professor and conservation statesman, continued assimilating Indigenous people into his story of the would-be ethical progress of the pioneer, incorporating settler notions of outdoor recreation (Reference Leopold1949: 179). To support his claim that “wild game is no longer necessary as ‘food,’” Hornaday had written in 1913 that “In the United States, the day of the hungry Indian-fighting pioneer had gone by and there is an abundance of food everywhere” (310). “Physical combat for the means of subsistence … as an economic fact,” Leopold wrote in “Wilderness,” had “disappeared as such” (192). As he had noted in the Almanac’s Foreword, outdoor survival had been replaced by “the assurance [by mechanization] of a good breakfast” (vii).

Hunting and fishing remained critical to Leopold in another way, however, as “a means of perpetuating, in sport form, the more virile and primitive skills in pioneering travel and subsistence” (192). The importance of certain types of outdoor recreation, which you might “know in your bones” (or as “atavistic instincts,” see Warren Reference Warren2016: 282), went to the “wild roots” of culture, in Leopold’s terms (177). And the “cultural values” of wilderness recreation included stimulating “awareness of history” or “’nationalism’ in its best sense” (177); “elemental man-earth relation,” and “voluntary limitation” on use of tools called “sportsmanship” (178). Toward these gains, Leopold praised not only hunting and fishing, but especially canoe travel and travel by pack-train as key “primitive skills” American-style. At the same time, slantwise, he encouraged restrictions on the experience-foiling and wide-spreading “tune of motor launches.” And Leopold blamed, in particular, “Your Hudson Bay Indian”Footnote ⁴⁴ who “now has a put-put” (193) and whose reasons for using it were their own. With his offhand, condescending complaint, Leopold assimilated Indigenous Peoples into his narrative of the ongoing, inevitable, modern, and industrialized “world-wide hybridization of cultures” (188) into which his idea of conservation must intervene. And Leopold so-relegated the awareness of structural injustice along with the awareness of histories, nationalisms, traditional food relationships, and ways of life of multiple Indigenous Nations and Tribes, while regulating their self-determination and appropriating control of Indigenous lands and of the values of so-called “primitive skills” (Deloria, Reference Deloria2022: 101).

In addition to the wilderness values of recreation (prioritizing performative facets of pioneering life “to be more like the very people they were excluding,” Cryer: Reference Cryer2015: 498) and for establishing refuges for especially large and threatened species (e.g., “Alaskan [grizzly] bears”), Leopold discussed two other key justifications to preserve “wilderness” in his essay “Wilderness” of the Almanac. There was the value of “tag-ends” or “museum pieces” of land, which may include small and even human-occupied remnants (for generations to experience “the origins of their cultural inheritance,” 188–92). And, as previously noted, there was the value of preserving wilderness for science (as a “base datum of normality … of how healthy land maintains itself as an organism,” 194–98). These categories of wilderness value crescendo into Leopold’s proposal to take wilderness, all in all, as that “single starting point,” a source where the search for “a durable scale of values” re-sets repeatedly.Footnote ⁴⁵

Besides assimilation of Indigenous people into the recreational value of wilderness, there was overlap between the value of preserving “tag-ends” of wilderness and of North American tribes, in Leopold’s thinking. For example, among remnants worth preserving were “the last little fragment” of Pueblo “Indian culture” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 102)Footnote ⁴⁶ and “the last Seminole culture, the last wild eastern cougar, and one of the last groups of pure eastern turkey.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In the cases both of Pueblo Peoples and Seminole, defense of their “last” was against threats of destruction of land and “wild things” by profit-driven industrialization against which his ideas of conservation stood. Leopold justified protecting the Pueblo fragment because “the Creator” made “mankind, in his image” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 102). This was similar to his arguments to respect all that was God-made (96) or evolved by “Nature” (Warren, Reference Warren2016: 94) and for the safe-keeping all the “parts” of landFootnote ⁴⁸ and of “the greatest possible variety” of “indigenous” animals (Reference Leopold1933: 403). Leopold’s tag-end arguments did not, however, acknowledge the collective continuance of the nineteen Pueblo Nations – from Acoma to Zuni – including fierce opposition to Spanish and U.S. colonization. “The Pueblo Indians … civilization expired, but not because their land expired,” Leopold commented blankly in his Almanac (207).

Leopold’s justification for including Seminole in his list of “wild resources” also was strategic. Protecting them overlapped with protecting deer upon which the “last easterly remnant of cougar depended” (Leopold, 1940). Romantic and condescending arguments might even have some positive consequences, for instance, supporting some Pueblo peoples’ survival, giving Seminole ecology some protection, maintaining, and/or expanding (under the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act) some Reservation lands, at least in the short run (Taffa, Reference Taffa2024: 70).Footnote ⁴⁹ They did not deeply align with Indigenous Seminole self-determination, however. Seminole, already with every reason to maintain suspicion of and resistance to colonialist treachery (Philip, Reference Philip1977), had told officials that the deer of their Reservation did not have ticks (Komarek, Reference Komarek1941).Footnote ⁵⁰ Nonetheless the Seminole were beset by feuding U.S. agency men and conservation scientists (including supported by Leopold). The officials appeared with their own agendas, insistent on proving or disproving the presence of ticks themselves, destabilizing U.S. government efforts to rebuild trust.

A key value of wilderness for Leopold was for science: to keep a “laboratory” of healthy land “organisms” to study in order to diagnose lands “deranged” and “sickened” by pioneering and its aftermath and to guide efforts in healing them. For this purpose, Leopold proposes “two available norms.” The first is land occupied by humans, for centuries, yet wherein the “land physiology remains largely normal.” Leopold claims to know of “only one such place,” naming “north-eastern Europe” (Leopold, Reference Leopold1949: 149–153).Footnote ⁵¹ Yet, on the following page, without so-exalting it, he describes another example – the trout-filled and mossy-banked “Sierra Madre of Chihuahua, never grazed or used [by Euro-American settlers] for fear of [warring] Indians.” That is, although obviously well occupied by humans – Apache Tribes – readers are left to infer that Leopold relegates Apache outside his meaning of “human” in order to appropriate the flourishing area into what he calls the “Sierra Madre wilderness” (italics mine). Leopold then praises this “wilderness” as “a norm for the cure of sick land on both sides of the [Mexican-U.S.] border,” and, moreover, a “good-neighbor enterprise” (Leopold, Reference Leopold1949: 197).

The second “most perfect [land health] norm,” Leopold says, “is wilderness,” or, “virgin country” (Leopold, Reference Leopold1949: 191, 196). As examples, Leopold defines swaths of so-called Canada and Alaska by quoting (imperfectly and, again, without citation) “To the Man of the High North” by poet Robert Service: “Where nameless men by nameless rivers wander/And in strange valleys die strange deaths alone.”Footnote ⁵² “To those devoid of imagination,” Leopold wrote in “Conservation Esthetic,” “a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part,” holding up Alaska as a prime example (Reference Leopold1949: 176). Service’s gold “moilers” aside, “a blank place,” whether viewed as useless or valuable, relegates from settler imaginations how “Alaska” is a geography, formerly occupied by Russia and then by the U.S., but unceded by self-determining Indigenous Nations and Tribes. It suppresses how Alaska Natives have originated at least twenty local languages with which to map their own homelands. It covers over those who have skillfully adapted and thrived across this vast area for time immemorial, “over the millennia” (e.g., Mishler and Frank, Reference Mishler and Frank2019: 36), who are woven into their own ecologies with attached rights and responsibilities.

“Nimiqtuumaruq aktunaamik: bound with a rope. / This land with its laws that serve as wire / and root to draw us together,” says Iñupiaq and poet Joan Naviyuk Kane in “Exceeding Beringia” (Smith, Reference Smith2021: 167–168).Footnote ⁵³ Her poem destabilizes any claims to a “land bridge” history of one-way migration of human beings, from Asia to North America. In this mistaken, universalizing narrative, people moved through the Arctic finding “temperate-normative” ideals to the south, as dAXunhyuu (Eyak, Alaska Native) geographer Jen Rose Smith discusses (Reference Smith2021: 159–160).Footnote ⁵⁴ That history, too, told by “Natural Historians,” repeats imaginaries relegating Peoples of the Arctic and other cold places – dAXunhyuu, Iñupiat, Gwich’in and the many more. Despite colonialist efforts otherwise, they retain their own creation stories – “emergences, transits, and arrivals” – and are actors in “the History of the World” with the highest attainments of “the human mind,” Smith writes (162, 163, 165), in terms counter to racialized, environmentally deterministic claims. And, despite cultural fissures wreaked also by assimilative acts, such as by-force English-only boarding schools, Alaska Native Peoples have many names for themselves and for rivers and other features of their albeit appropriated geographies (Raboff, Reference Raboff2001; Baldwin, et al., Reference Baldwin, Noodin, Perley and Grusin2018).Footnote ⁵⁵

There is, for instance, “the Kuzitrun,” as Kane writes (in Smith, 167–168),

“Let us lose our grief,” Kane continues a few lines later, “in great rafts as we translate the renamed // straits.”

“Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility,” Leopold wrote (Reference Leopold1949: 200). As I reconsider his senses of value, I can renew my cultural ancestor’s affection for more-than-humankinds. I still avow his human hearts-motivating resistance to commodifying-industrial extractive land wreckage. At the same time, revisioning Leopoldian value, I disavow his presumptuous, grand narrative – of historical moral ascendancy normalized in “wilderness” hand-in-hand with “land health.” Counter to his proposal of humility, these concepts demonstrate no change in thinking about ancestral racism and entitled authority. His grand historical narrative builds from Euro-(colonizing) pioneer to (settler) laborer-in-repose, to land-wanderer and healer who gains “definition and meaning.” At the same time, paradoxically, his settler-colonialist story effects relegation of many Native Peoples from full human stature and off their homelands also removing their place names from maps, appropriates their customary territories, and assimilates Native Peoples disrupting ecologies, cultures, languages, and values, as we shall see in yet further examples. Leopold’s tale also vanishes, by condescending or no mention, generations of enslaved Black lives, dispossessed Latinas/os, Chinese, and more “non-white” identities (Savoy, Reference Savoy2015: 33).Footnote ⁵⁶

In “The Land Ethic” of his Almanac, Leopold offers a succinct yet detailed narrative of settler-colonial deliverance into the world of the land ethic. He expounds “The Ethical Sequence” with origins in “Odysseus’ Greece,” the hero’s killing of his wife Penelope’s suitors, and the murder of disloyal “slave girls.” From that violently punishing beginning, Leopold sketches a history “of three thousand years” of an extending “ethical structure.” Improving on the ancients, not only men but, he implies, women and “human chattels” have become morally encompassed. From relations between individuals, ethics have expanded to include those between individuals and society and vice versa in this tale. The next needed ethical step, Leopold proposes, looking to the future, is from “man” to “soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land,” for which he takes “wilderness” as the most perfect norm of settler-occupied land health.

As seen throughout this section, this land health vision relegates Indigenous Peoples out of “wildernesses,” appropriates the lands they belong to, and assimilates Indigenous and other diverse cultures into a tale of “world-wide hybridization,” unprecedented “in the history of the human species” (Leopold, Reference Leopold1949: 118, 218). Leopold’s historical ethical narrative of a much-needed moral ascension also folds everyone into it, as Whyte underscores, many without consent. “All ethics so far evolved,” Leopold writes, “rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts” [italics mine (203)]. A healthy “land community,” to Leopold’s assimilative perception, “changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror to plain member and citizen of it” (204). “There is as yet no ethic [italics mine] dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus’s slave girls, is still property. The land relation is still [from the ancient times of Homer’s Odysseus] strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations” (203). “The extension of ethics” to “the land-relation,” Leopold proposes, is “an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity” (203). I have needed to stop and reflect further on what that points to.

At my earliest reading of A Sand County Almanac, Leopold’s narrative trajectory sat uncomfortably with me. Schooled in Calvinism’s doctrine of original sin, I still questioned faith, generally and personally, in a story of collective human improvement. As a trained scientist, moreover, I understood that evolution by natural selection, after all, isn’t about “improvement” of organisms per se but about adaptive changes, across generations, within a population interacting within dynamic local geographies. From the start, I felt how Leopold, far from exhibiting “intellectual humility” or teachability, was overreaching when he wrote in such sweeping terms. Though still ignorant of details I needed to know, and living under a master narrative I had hardly yet recognized, I already knew something was wrong. Feeling your gut and cultivating that kind of knowing is crucial to countering improper and dangerous claims. I wish I had done so far sooner.

As Whyte concludes in his reading of the narrative of moral ascension, “Leopold’s history of ethics is based on a narrative the plot of which goes in the opposite direction of the narratives many Indigenous peoples would provide of their ethics.” “Many Indigenous people would see the colonialisms of the last 500 years,” Whyte says, “as introducing ethics that were less inclusive of non-human entities and collectives.” Indigenous Peoples with relations disrupted and land-care responsibilities obstructed by imposed settler-colonialist stories, experiencing violent consequences, Whyte explains, “cannot see themselves in Leopold’s historic sequence because they do not see the progression of their societies as moving toward a land ethic; rather, the fear is that their societies are moving away from being societies in which their ethic is fully entrenched in their lifestyles and in the self-governance of their societies and nations” (Whyte, Reference Whyte, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2024).

3.2 Consequential Ethical Abstractions: Who “Inherits the Earth”?

Leopold’s grand historical narrative of self-redemptive cultural and moral ascension not only unfolded in a direction opposite to many Indigenous ethical trajectories experienced under settler-colonialism. It stifled the latter, and its insights, in its sweeping claim to be telling “all history.” Similarly, the idea of a common humanity – that is, the biologically based “we” of the “human race” or Homo sapiens (Fuentes, et al., Reference Fuentes, Ackermann and Athreya2019) differentiated from other life forms – might be rhetorically appealing in many ways and sometimes appropriate. But, as I earlier acknowledged my own rote repetition of this ancestral proposal, this unspecified “we” can also be a cover for a controlling group to systematically assimilate other groups into itself, an immoral violence that also manifests an imprudent relegation of diversity (Colebrook, Reference Colebrook and Grusin2018). On the other hand, Leopold’s ascensional, moral-historical narrative interlocks with relatively recent, false beliefs about human variation masquerading as scientific classification. “Race” is an abstraction with very real consequences used to classify and regulate people as different groups of “others” while upholding white supremacy. As discussed earlier, white supremacy is rooted in pre-existent, resilient, expansionary European settler-colonialism and woven into the fibers of U.S. nationhood structured to appropriate and profit from land (Memmi, Reference Memmi1965; Wolfe, Reference Wolfe2006; Tallbear, Reference Tallbear2013; Fuentes, et al., Reference Fuentes, Ackermann and Athreya2019; McLean, Reference McLean2020).

Race “arose as a justification for Euro-Western colonialism and enslavement,” according to Queer Trans and Black scientist Shay-Akil McLean (Reference McLean2020: 41). “Race is a product of racism, always,” writes McLean (Reference McLean2020: 43) and has “never been wholly innocent, unbiased, or apolitical” (Fuentes et al., Reference Fuentes, Ackermann and Athreya2019: 401). Race is historical in the sense that “race/ism,” as a socially constructed and learned system of thought and practices, has not existed in all times and places (McLean, Reference McLean2020: 42). Lauret Savoy observes how Virginia colonists in the Chesapeake region developed their rules of slavery and of race. By the late 1600s they were “referring to themselves as ‘white’ rather than primarily English or Christian,” Savoy says. In this way, European settlers elevated their power over those whose land they would forcibly take – “Patawomeck, Mattaponi, Rappahannock, Powhatan, so many more” lumped into the category “Indian” – and those they had forcibly taken from vast Africa – “Igbo. Ibibio. Moko. Kongo. Wolof. Bamana. Akan. Ga. Others” lumped into “Negro” or “Black.” These categories came to mark not only difference but deficiency linked to physical markers such as skin color, Savoy explains.Footnote ⁵⁷

The erroneous “rigid ‘biological’ taxonomies of later centuries,” as Savoy tells us, “lurched” from this legacy of hierarchical racial categories. Then, in the nineteenth century, ideas about “race” normalized into “a scientific object of inquiry,” according to Tallbear (Reference Tallbear2013: 33). This helped swing the focus away from race as a problem of “difference in power and resources” into baseless assumptions of race as a “problem of difference in phenotype and attitude” (McLean, Reference McLean2020: 43–44). “Biology,” McLean says, “did not recruit race; instead, race and raceism recruited biology” into its political aspirations (44). Since there is a before “race,” as McLean says, there might also be an afterward. That is, this knowledge points to a future unlearning, an abolishment of race/ism – dismantling the profit-driven, resource-minded, and carceral system and revisioning relationships conjoined with decolonization, including Land Back.Footnote ⁵⁸

From early in his career to his final writings, Leopold’s occupation with defining and expressing good land use brought him repeatedly to his “search for a durable scale of values” informed by “wilderness” (Reference Leopold1949: 200). It also raised multiple manifestations of a troubling question – how to get more people to share in that search? This question, in various formulations, helped motivate his developments of “the land ethic” and the need for an “ecological conscience.” These developments were enmeshed with paradigmatic concepts of race science and its applications, which also took on various guises as one or another became more obviously repellent. Because Leopold’s responses to the vexing question of how to get people to act better did not root out racist assumptions about who mattered, his models of good land use and how to achieve it would continue to privilege Euro-Americans in ownership of and access to land. And this raised a frustrating contradiction – a supremely capable people (according to themselves) whose success at building power was outpacing the development of their ethics. Leopold’s view would continue to look straight past those who already had long records of intelligent, adaptive, successful land-keeping. Continuing on this path could be to continue suppressing many “practical models for ethics offered by many North American Indigenous persons,” as Whyte discusses. For instance, as expressed in collective water-protection action of Anishinaabe women in the Great Lakes Basin, practical models that involve “people who are finding ways to live their responsibilities in contemporary times” and “in their own homelands, or in the territories to which they’ve been forcibly removed.” The practical models already amalgamate Indigenous peoples’ own relationships with water, wild rice, sturgeon, or caribou, ecologies and agricultures, scientific research, and “anti-colonial action,” and “critical feedback-loops” (Whyte, Reference Whyte, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2024). Such ongoing suppression would run counter to stable Indigenous-settler coalitions.

A permutation of the vexing matter of how to get the people in power to use land better arises in openly racialized terms, within the first half of Leopold’s career. For instance, it occurs in a 1922 talk “uncovered and submitted” by a colleague and first published in 1946 as a work standing the test of time and as a landmark on Southwestern U.S. erosion problems and proposed solutions.Footnote ⁵⁹ Leopold begins, provocatively, by addressing his audience as members of “the Nordic race,” a nineteenth- to twentieth-century self-mirroring classification of superior humans from the north of Europe (Powell, Reference Powell2015: 201). Like many of his colleagues, it seems Leopold was familiar with the influential, purportedly scientific text The Passing of the Great Race, or, The Racial Basis of European History (1916) by conservationist, anthropologist, and eugenicist Madison Grant.Footnote ⁶⁰ Fairfield Osborn, Sr., another influential conservationist and eugenicist who introduced the book, claimed that Grant had “turned this historical sketch into the current of a great biological movement,” terming it “a hereditary history of Europe” (1). In the book, Grant describes Nordics as the human stock (particularly its Anglo-Saxon branch) upon which the U.S. must chiefly depend (3). “Anthropologists tell us,” as Leopold framed a similar idea, “that we, the Nordics, have a racial genius for pioneering surpassing all other races and all other creatures in ability to reduce the wilderness to possession,” from “Alaska to Brazil” and elsewhere. The reach of this “destiny of conquest and colonization” was wide and ongoing, “Leopold noted in his 1922 remarks” (Reference Leopold1946b: 627).

And, then, a twist. Leopold had observed that Nordic methods clearly were successful in the sense of “conquering the wilderness.” They had not been so “efficient”; however, he prodded his audience, in “creating more useful land with the labor of our hands than we are unintentionally destroying with the trampling of our feet.” “We, the community, are the fools and it is high time we realized it and mended our ways,” Leopold urged. He went on to diagnose, in detail, “the direct result of our own mis-use of the country we are trying to improve” (627). Overgrazing livestock, he explained, created flooding that ate away the soil, which was the foundation for the range industry, sustained family ranching, and, in particular, of the local Blue River community. The land and infrastructures would be expensive to replace, if they even could be. This, Leopold stressed, again, ironically, “is Nordic genius.” “It sounds more like what John Burroughs said about the genius of the potato bug,” he continued, “which, by exterminating the potato, thereby exterminates itself” (629).

Included as snapshots of destruction, Leopold describes “ancient fruit trees” rooted in cliffs of clay suddenly toppling “into the man-made abyss” created by Euro-settler overuse – “the symbol,” Leopold says, of “a fruitful land reverting to the aboriginal desert.” And he reports that, in “Navajo country,” geologists discovered underground water recently exposed by erosion (presumably also due to overgrazing) now open to evaporation, and, thus, to further loss (630). Leopold here passes over opportunities for respecting the skills and ethics of past Indigenous land users and the constraints placed on current ones. He jumps over them to propose his own remedies to better settler land uses. “Nobody advocates that we cease grazing,” Leopold stresses. “That would be a merely negative solution;” he explains, “a confession of impotence and lack of skill” (631).

Characteristically, Leopold proposes his own positive remedies. In the case of erosion in the U.S. Southwest, he considers a proper balance between public and private responsibility. Public agencies, he suggests, could help develop supportive technologies and lend a hand in performing work on rivers and reservoirs. The bulk of the “control work,” however, to “minimize ill effects of grazing” must be done by “the land owner,” Leopold says. “The day will come,” he urges, “when the ownership of land will carry with it the obligation to use and protect it from erosion so that it is not a menace to other landowners and the public” (631). In this case, in the matter of his audience living up to their superior status, he foresees a future in which law-enforced landowner responsibility is in place. Until the day when better land care becomes legally normalized, however, Leopold offers tips for short-term techniques of prevention and cure – such as fencing, stream-bank restoration, cattle watering, flood diversion methods, and gully control. Several measures would take coordinated, neighborly efforts. Leopold here calls in to action and privilege a more select subset of “Nordics” – “those owners sufficiently progressive, or sufficiently menaced by impending loss” by erosion (631), thus undermining land’s “ultimate capacity for supporting man” (633). Given the urgency to protect the public interest in habitable land, Leopold also recommends government power to inspect all lands “as to the adequacy of erosion control,” with authority to “force all owners, whether private or public, to conserve their lands or pass title to someone who will” (633).

Leopold, well-respected by his scientific audiences, had the confidence and rapport to issue such firm recommendations. The framing of his argument in openly racialized and discriminatory terms with a rhetorical tone that was provocatively ironic and even self-mocking indicates his authority. The model of his future vision expanded from a select “progressive” minority of the already elite “blue-eyed pioneers” (627). It expressed hope in the day when the values of that minority, one way or another, would live up to their public obligations as settled landowning citizens. Side-by-side with Leopold’s frustration over the ways his powerful “race” were misusing land, his focus on their own self-improvement would remain steadfast. At this elitist, racialized and racist intersection of frustration over settler-colonial land ruination, in other words, Leopold would continue to marginalize Indigenous, Black and other groups who were not legible as the “someone who will” control erosion, but, at the most, as the someone who, perhaps in the past, had existed as conservative, if not intelligent, land users.

Leopold’s provocative use of the racial category “Nordic” in “Erosion as a Menace” could also have been a wink at outdated terminology, albeit not race/ism itself, with a nod to changing scientific understandings. Whether taken at face value or as ironic, Leopold’s language, rhetorically, could support a shared, even clubby sense of superiority he could then challenge his learned audiences to live up to.Footnote ⁶¹ During the twentieth century, many scientists were finding biological race categories irresolvable. Many were backing away from scientific racism, popularized from the 1850s on, and heading toward general agreement that race is socially constructed (Tallbear, Reference Tallbear2013: 33, 37; Powell, Reference Powell2016: 159). A few years before Grant’s book, anthropologist Franz Boas had published The Mind of Primitive Man (Reference Boas1911). A “Boasian model” had been gaining traction around the turn of the twentieth century. This, too, was helping shift racial conceptualization away from a Social Darwinist “survival of the fittest,” evolutionary march of progress – with its view of Europeans races outcompeting all others – and toward a view of plural “cultures.” Yet “cultures” outfitted the race concept with new clothes. The Boasian model, on the surface, seemed a move away from racism while keeping racialized white settler-colonial power structures intact, which continued to disappear Indigenous Peoples (Tallbear, Reference Tallbear2013: 36; Simpson, Reference Simpson, Blackhawk and Shanley2018: 178; McLean, Reference McLean2020). “Indians,” since the “influx of the more numerous Europeans,” Boas wrote, have never become an “important element in our population” (Simpson, Reference Simpson, Blackhawk and Shanley2018: 176). Boas’s model, however, neglected the surrounding context of “geographic formalization of the settler status of the nation-state with its attendant race-based ‘immigration,’” in the words of political anthropologist Audra Simpson, through appropriation of Indigenous lands and relegation of Indigenous Peoples to various elsewheres (Reference Simpson, Blackhawk and Shanley2018: 171).

Boas was not part of Leopold’s scientific and conservation communities like Grant was. I don’t find direct reference to Boas in Leopold’s works or letters. Yet there is a seemingly reverberant echo of language in Leopold’s “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest” (1923). This essay, unpublished until 1979, appeared in the first volume of Environmental Ethics as “Leopold’s first attempt to deal with the moral aspects of conservation and develop a philosophy of conservation” (131).Footnote ⁶² As in “Erosion As a Menace,” Leopold describes his frustration with dry farming, which is “slicing at one end of our loaf while the other end sloughs away in waste” until they meet in the middle and it becomes clear “the whole loaf” was needed (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 87). “Erosion eats into our hills like a contagion, and floods bring down loosened soil upon our valleys like a scourge,” he wrote in a prophetic tone. “Water, soil, animals, and plants – the very fabric of prosperity – react to destroy each other and us.” “Science can and must unravel those reactions,” he continued, “and government must enforce the findings of science.” Expanding from the legal and top-down emphasis of “Erosion as a Menace,” Leopold here points to “the economic bearing of conservation on the future of the Southwest” (93) before moving from conservation “as an economic issue”Footnote ⁶³ to consider its “moral aspects” (94) in a section titled “Conservation as a Moral Issue.”

In this concluding section, Leopold travels from the Judeo-Christian book of Ezekiel to the Russian philosopher Peter Ouspensky to the Scottish-American wilderness preservationist John Muir to the American poet William Cullen Bryant to the Australian philosopher John Hadley to “God himself.” He evokes scientific understandings of and intuitive respect for earth’s interdependency, responsibility to future generations, care for waterways and a living earth, and religious humility regarding the role of “man” in creation. Since, to Leopold’s perspective, “most of mankind today” profess religious and/or scientific anthropomorphism, he rhetorically grants “the earth is for man.” Then he raises a question: “What man?” “Five races – five cultures – have flourished here,” he writes. Though he lists only four –“cliff dwellers,” “the Pueblos,” “the Spaniards,” “and now we Americans.” He argues that “We may truthfully say of our four predecessors that they left the earth alive, undamaged.”Footnote ⁶⁴

While exchanging “we, the Nordics” for “we Americans,” a term for those with political control that might sound both less racist and more assimilative, this summary speeds past invasion and colonization, treaty-breaking, the discontinuation of treaty-making, genocide, enslavement, incarceration (including boarding schools), revolution, ongoing Indigenous resistance, and land annexation and dispossession of Pueblo, Ute, Apache, and other Indigenous Tribes and communities. It recognizes neither Black persons such as the nearby Buffalo soldiers nor dispossessed Mexican Americans, overlooking, in the words of Queer Chicana scholar Priscilla Ybarra, “generations of [Mexican Americans’] experience with the land” (Reference Ybarra2016: 5). “Hidden in plain sight,” Ybarra says, in fact, was the “Mexican American background” of Leopold’s own wife, Estella Bergere Leopold, and their five children as well as Estella’s family’s inheritance of land through dispossession of Pueblo Tribes (2022: 31–32).Footnote ⁶⁵

On the other hand, Leopold’s moral narrative does conclude with wondering what the sixth “race” or “culture” “shall say about us.” He thus acknowledges, with humility, that no civilization lasts forever, including his own self-impressed one, while goading readers toward the matter that keeps vexing him. Leopold asks rhetorically, “if there be, indeed, a special nobility inherent in the human race – a special cosmic value, distinctive from and superior to all other life – by what token shall it be manifest?” He follows this question with two alternatives and ends with a final assertion: “By a society decently respectful of its own and all other life, capable of inhabiting the earth without defiling it?” “Or,” he continues, echoing “Erosion as a Menace,“ by a society like that of John Burroughs potato bug, which exterminated the potato, and thereby exterminated itself? As one or the other,” Leopold concludes, “we shall be judged [in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson] in ‘the derisive silence of eternity’” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 96–97).

Leopold’s terms shift swiftly – “races” or “cultures,” “we Americans,” “we,” “the human race” – but the undercurrent remains constant. The troubling question remains – how shall Euro-American settler colonizers prove their mettle as good land owners? The trouble goes hand in hand with Indigenous elimination and land dispossession. What was to be done, given the paradoxical assumptions that those in power were racially and/or culturally advanced? Here is a people recently claiming the highest order evolutionary capacity to control nature rather than be controlled by it (Tallbear, Reference Tallbear2013: 36), or to be the more “sturdy” (Simpson, Reference Simpson, Blackhawk and Shanley2018: 175) or competitive “culture” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 102). Yet the same people lack the self-control and skills of positive land use. Below the surface, Leopold’s diagnoses and remedies repeatedly leave racist structures intact. He questions many things, but he does not reflect on the histories of “our four predecessors,” in his terms, as skilled thinkers and inventors who “left the earth alive, undamaged” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 96). He does not consider the wherewithal of those hidden in plain sight. Leopold might have been willing, even courageously so, to grill the “nobility” of his own powerful society. Nonetheless, in various ways, his narratives continue suppressing Indigenous presence. Doing the opposite would be to moot the very framing of the frustrating contradiction. Leopold’s narratives would head, from here on, toward grappling with conservation as a moral issue, toward the development of his land ethic, toward the goal of “improving ourselves” which would be to “make functional” or “evolve” “an ecological conscience” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 340, 345) among private land owners who were predominantly male and white.

There is another loaf-wasting story of U.S. land possession that did not surface as a concern in Leopold’s historical and contemporary narratives, nor in Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey, except, again, in pioneering terms. There were the violent U.S. appropriations and exchanges of the Indigenous territories west of the Mississippi and the forced relegations there of eastern Tribes, as their homelands were taken. Euro-American settler colonialist boundary-making expressed rapacity for land. It, too, expressed a habit of taking more than giving, which would undercut themselves. As the U.S. sliced westward from the Atlantic the possibility of more land sloughed away upon reaching the Pacific.Footnote ⁶⁶ As settlers re-surged eastward somewhere in the middle they met the front from the west. And, as discussed by Australian historian and scholar Patrick Wolfe: “There was simply no space left for [Indian] removal.” Indigenous people who were now “contained within Euroamerican society” became subject to a rising force of U.S. strategies for Indigenous elimination by assimilation (Reference Wolfe2006: 399).

This story has been overshadowed in U.S. education and in Leopoldian narratives by the pioneering terms of American historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who coincidentally became Leopold’s near neighbor in Wisconsin. As I summarized in Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey, Turner proposed that the challenges of frontier life, of clearing forests and cultivating crops, had forged citizens of self-reliance and fortitude, a new national type, the democratic self-made man, free and equal (Warren, Reference Warren2016: 21–22). Writing in the 1890s, Turner had declared the U.S. frontier was closed, the “vacant spaces” filled up, “a people thrown back upon itself.” “Its diverse elements,” Turner proposed, “are being fused into national unity” (Warren: 36–7, 102). It seemed to Turner that a shift from pioneering to the formation of a permanent civilization was taking place. For Leopold’s part, as a scientific forester and, later, as an academic land ecologist, he had taken leads in counseling U.S. citizens to remedy the wood and game shortages, soil erosion, flooding, and losses of “wild things” left in the wake of pioneering and to do better. Yet, even for Leopold, “’nationalism’ in its best sense,” would continue hearkening back to Euro-American pioneers’ “cultural inheritance” (Reference Leopold1949: 188). Among the “cultural values” of wildlife, of “the sports, customs, and experiences that renew contacts with wild things,” as he would write in his Almanac, was the “split-rail value.” This value encompassed “any experience that reminds us of our distinctive national origins and evolution.” This was exemplified by “a boy scout [who] has tanned a coonskin cap, and goes Daniel-Booneing in the willow thicket below the tracts.” “He is reenacting American history.” And, “to that extent,” is “culturally prepared to face the dark and bloody realities of the present” (1949: 177).

“Daniel-Booneing” would be, “to that extent,” a re-enactment of violent appropriation of Tsalaguwetiyi (Cherokee, East), S’atsoyaha (Yuchi), and Shawandasse Tula (Shawanwaki/Shawnee) territories, brought into Kentucky statehood, as well as of hunting skills and various woodcrafts, in heroic terms, second to none, including Indigenous ones. “Dark and bloody,” according to the Kentucky Heritage Council,Footnote ⁶⁷ gestures to a belief that these Indigenous sovereignties had hunted and fought over the land, but had never lived permanently anywhere in the Commonwealth – a well-practiced excuse for Euro-American taking. “Daniel-Booneing” would be to model, in play-clothes, how settler colonialism “destroys to replace,” as Wolfe discusses referencing strategies of U.S.-supported Zionism against Palestinian existence. Allusions such as these call for further exploration (beyond Leopold), both in terms of how they apply to Indigenous persons and to structural, if not consciously intentional, nationalistic schemes of demolition-to-remake the fruitfulness of the land as a whole (Wolfe, Reference Wolfe2006: 388). They remind how destruction – as an intention in itself – to various degrees and kinds, belongs to settler colonialism. They point to how “being fused into national unity” may not be a shift from pioneering, but a platform along a continuous, ongoing “structural genocide,” to apply Wolfe’s term (403). Such awareness might help in getting to the roots of Leopold’s and many settlers’ ongoing passionate frustrations over why none of our environmental or conservation movements, to date, have been successful in staving off continuous, ongoing land misuse in the U.S. (and beyond).

With regard to fusing national unity, in Turner’s terms, or, in other words, to addressing an “expansion-conservation tension” in the U.S., I surveyed three historical ideas in Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey: buying more land to keep the frontier open, which appeared finished; “reclaiming” new farms by irrigating more drylands (without the wastage Leopold railed against); and applying scientific methods to enhance intergenerational sustainability of renewable resources, including forests, ranges, and fisheries (Warren, Reference Warren2016: 37–38). I left out how U.S. strategies to eliminate Indigenous Peoples also turned inwards to “the individual Indian below [the tribal surface],” in Wolfe’s words (Reference Wolfe2006: 399). In the late 1800s, strategies increasingly featured measures for breaking down Tribes and assimilating Native persons and their tribal lands into “White society” (400).

This process became apparent in 1871 when the U.S. discontinued treaty-making. A central tactic was the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, which broke tribal land into individual allotments to ostensibly turn Indigenous persons into private landowners on the path to the American Dream (Wolfe, Reference Wolfe2006: 400; Simpson Reference Simpson, Blackhawk and Shanley2018: 171). In effect, Indigenous numbers plummeted to their lowest recorded levels. Recent scholars estimate that in 1492 there were some eighteen million persons, or, very roughly five persons per square mile. This was greater than the human density of Leopold’s Southwest district during his whole tenure. By the turn of the nineteenth century, Indigenous persons numbered approximately 228,000, averaging fewer than one person per square mile (Dunbar-Ortiz, Reference Dunbar-Ortiz2014: 136–138; Gilio-Whitaker, Reference Gilio-Whitaker2019: 49). And, as Wolfe notes, land transference to settlers sky-rocketed. Between 1881 and 1931, total U.S. acreage in Indigenous hands fell by two thirds, from approximately 155 million to 52 million acres (Wolfe, Reference Wolfe2006: 400), while Native Americans, overall, had a marked “demographic explosion” in the twentieth century (Tallbear, Reference Tallbear2013: 46). Meanwhile, under both the Dawes Act and the 1934 Indian Reform Act (which allowed a brief swell in tribal lands), the U.S. government deployed blood quantum requirements that, in effect, were to continue a process of racialized assimilation (Wolfe, Reference Wolfe2006: 400; Ben-zvi, Reference Ben-zvi2007: 226; Tallbear, Reference Tallbear2013: 460; Taffa, Reference Taffa2024: 70) that also continued intersecting with race science (Turda, Reference Turda, Bashford and Levine2012: 70–71; Tallbear Reference Tallbear2013: 48).

Remaining buried within Leopold’s models of human ethics is this ruthless process of transference of lands from Indigenous to white people while devaluing Indigenous social and political norms and elevating settler ones, including the institution of private property.Footnote ⁶⁸ Integrated within Leopold’s racist models for addressing the troubling question of how white landowners would become better land users is a history of ideas about population control, scientific and ideological. Even as Indigenous numbers fell and settler numbers rose, the fear of Euro-American white race deterioration, if not outright extinction, detailed in Grant’s Reference Grant1916 book, did not disappear. From the late nineteenth century, white settlers worried that Black persons and other non-white people, including incoming immigrants, would out-reproduce them (Powell, Reference Powell2015: 222). “Fear of human extinction has been the drum beaten by every prophet from St. John to the Los Angeles cults,” Leopold claimed in a 1941 classroom lecture (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 281). On the other hand, through the twentieth century, national to global overpopulation became of increasing concern in the U.S. In the same 1941 lecture, “Ecology and Politics,” Leopold stressed the importance of ecological limits, including on human population densities. By the 1940s, with another world war looming, that question of how technologically advanced U.S. Euro-Americans could improve their ethics overlapped with how to keep their own, not to mention global numbers, within lands’ carrying capacities.

At the foundation of the ecological concept of carrying capacity is a theory of English economist, cleric, and scholar Thomas Malthus (1766–1834). In 1798, Malthus published his first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population. His argument centered scarcity and competition. He suggested that population growth was exponential and would outgrow the arithmetical increase of food supply upon which human persons and other animals depended. Thus ever looming, as well as explaining the England around him, were “misery and vice,” acting as checks on endless numeric expansion. In a field influenced by Malthusian ideas, Leopold’s research related to preventing overgrazed ranges and increasing game (contra the protectionist view of his former mentor Hornaday) became focused on animal population numbers in relation to their food supply and also other “environmental factors,” such as predation, hunting, and disease. The control of population density, by diagnosing and manipulating various “factors of productivity,” was the work of the game manager, and this work could also apply to human density, Leopold proposed in his path-breaking Reference Leopold1933 textbook Game Management (25, 39, 41, 423).

That human beings were subject to the same forces as other animals was a view Leopold shared. This suggested analogies.Footnote ⁶⁹ At the same time, to the degree of their advancement, at least some humans also differed from other animals by merit of technologies for increasing food supply that could support more people and/or more game, at least to the limit of lands’ carrying capacities. In Game Management, Leopold defined carrying capacity, hearkening to Malthus, as the “maximum density” a particular range was “capable of supporting” (Reference Leopold1933: 50–51, 395; Warren Reference Warren2016: Chapter 4). There was some evidence of other ecological patterns, too. Bobwhite, a game bird of brushy meadows, for example, were subject not only to carrying capacity but also seemed to exhibit a scientific “phenomenon called ‘Saturation Point.’” According to Leopold, this self-limiting feature appeared to inhere in some species keeping “social units” from exceeding a fixed number per “unit area” (49; see also Callicott and Freyfogle, Reference Callicott and Freyfogle1999: 134–135).

Leopold, underscoring human-animal commonalities, offered one “little analogue with humans” of Bobwhites. “Man thinks of himself as not subject to any density limit,” Leopold said. “Industrialism, imperialism, and that whole array of population behaviors,” he argued, were manifestations of “the ‘bigger and better’ ideology” and the “Mosaic injunction” to fill up the earth. That is, “slums, wars, birth-controls, and depressions,” he continued, “may be construed as ecological symptoms that our assumption about human density limits is unwarranted” (see also Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 283). Thus “the lowly bobwhite” had a “lesson in sociology” to teach human beings. The Bobwhite, Leopold said, “’refuses,’” in biological terms, “to live in slums, and concentrates his racial effort on quality, not ciphers.” Occasionally, “his racial exuberance,” in other words, Bobwhites’ persistent reproductive force, “gets the upper hand,” Leopold explained. The consequences included economic and social unrest – “Bobwhite’s natural monogamy breaks down,” he said, in sexually moralizing terms – and Bobwhite “civilization relapses to near-zero for a new start” (Reference Leopold1933: 49).

Leopold concluded this analogy by observing that the Bobwhites’ “environmental and racial tolerances” reveal the birds to be “as finicky as any blue-stocking.” While both anthropomorphizing and taking a swing at intellectual women, this was to underscore the ill effects of what he deemed too-intensive management. This included game farming, which produced mob-like or artificialized populations, to his observation, which also imply interspecies supremacy, crediting as little agency to birds and bugs as to lower i.e., Indigenous humans. With another jab at his own heritage, Leopold pointed to the ill consequences if game farmers “planted the wrong race” in the wrong place, presumably referring to moving Bobwhites into new habitats. He left his phrasing ambiguous enough, though, for “the Nordics to ponder.” This draws attention, again, to another version of that unrelentingly vexing matter, a “paradox” of Euro-American technological power overwhelming ethics in land use (Reference Leopold1933: 422). Leopold’s suggestions in Game Management included to not waste the likely fleeting advantage of “our relatively low human population density as compared with Europe”Footnote ⁷⁰ (394), which offered a chance to avoid “slum” conditions for both Bobwhites and Euro-American land owners.

The opportunity of relatively low human density, Leopold wrote, “raises the interesting question of whether, having automatically filled up the biological niche which Columbus found for us, we will prove capable of regulating our future human population density by some qualitative standard” (Reference Leopold1933: 395). One such standard was “natural beauty” (422), he thought, versus subjecting ourselves (like Burroughs’s potato bug and/or over-farmed game birds) to the otherwise deleterious consequences. To “prove capable,” Leopold proposed, “the task of the future is to learn how to live with our inventions” as a matter of “a new conviction” (420). The task, in other words, was to bring about “a new attitude toward the land” (420), in the “average citizen,” which incorporated the “conviction” that the “capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment, rather than such density, is the true test of whether he is civilized” (423). What was needed, Leopold thought, was the transformation of the still small minority ready to resist the ugliness of “economic determinism” and its “food factories,” “developing a culture” of land possessors that would be “morally and intellectually” keeping pace with the consequences of its own innovativeness (422–423).

Many of Leopold’s evidence-based and moral understandings changed and developed over his career, while white supremacy remained rooted and continued to take new forms, often clothed in science. In the 1941 lecture, “Ecology and Politics,” and maintaining Malthusian-based population terms, Leopold defined “carrying capacity” for his students. “Every environment carries not only characteristic kinds of animals, but characteristic numbers of each.” “Thus,” he proposed, “the characteristic number of Indians in virgin America was small.” “More Indians,” he continued, “would either have starved or killed each other off; fewer Indians would have risked annihilation of the race in some blizzard, drouth, or epidemic” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 282). According to this scenario, if Indigenous Peoples had “left the earth alive,” as he had put it in his 1923 “Some Fundamentals” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 96), it had not been intentional but rather analogous with a Bobwhite-like inherence within their “races” or “cultures.”

“When we arrived on the scene,” Euro-Americans, on the other hand, had “raised the carrying capacity of the land for man by means of tools,” Leopold told his students (282). Stressing yet again the vexing paradox in new terms, he proposed that increasing “take” from the land without reciprocal “give” would not be sustainable (282). “All ecology is replete with laws,” Leopold explained, “which begin to operate at a threshold, and cease operating at a ceiling” (284). Or, as he would discuss in his Almanac, land use, including human population density, needed to be tooled to the differing resiliencies of each place. Western Europe, under pressure, was “tough” and “elastic,” he thought, as was, perhaps, Japan. “Most other civilized regions,” Leopold wrote, were in “various stages of [ecological] disorganization” and wastage, reducing carrying capacity while exceeding it (Reference Leopold1949: 219). For example, “already subsisting on exploitative agriculture,” Leopold wrote, “Most of South America is overpopulated in this sense” (219). “Ecology knows of no density relationship that holds for indefinitely wide limits,” he urged (220). How, then, could conservation support not just the land’s, but the attendant human capacity for thoughtful, land-use competence (Reference Leopold1933: 422), which he had continued believing was so scarce? How could wildlife managers and other conservationists bring ethics into sync with the world-wide expansion of powerful “technological culture” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 285)? Yet, across time and space and various scenarios, while deeply frustrated by members of his own Euro-American citizenry, he excluded Indigenous people and others racialized as non-white as having no capacity for intentional inventiveness in technology or philosophy.

“We assume,” Leopold said, “that increasing ‘take’ (i.e., more extraction, conversion, and consumption of resources) always raises standards of living.” “Sometimes it merely raises population levels,” he argued in his1941 lecture (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 285). He explained this to his students with another animal analogy. If you feed starving deer, he said, they reproduce more, over-browse, and damage their range more. Left without the land’s support, the deer themselves deteriorate, Leopold said. If “Indians” held within U.S. bounds seem to be like Bobwhites, “South African natives,” as Leopold proposed, were like deer (presumably without a built-in saturation point). In contrast, the !Xam (San) of southern Africa say of themselves: “Our strong spirit is not loud” and call for quiet listening.Footnote ⁷¹ San tell their own story that white colonizers believed “a dead bushman was better” and hunted them down to be shot like dogs. By 1950, all San communities had been destroyed or dispossessed, including expelled from a new national park. British and Boer colonizers, imposing wide swaths of ill-fitting agriculture, pushed San survivors to become “squatters,” marginalized within their own homelands by hostile Euro-settlers.Footnote ⁷² Whereas, the story Leopold told was that the British “ameliorated” the “hard lot of South African natives (by medical service, better farming, etc.)” resulting in increased population numbers without improvement in living conditions.Footnote ⁷³ “Perhaps only animals capable of qualitative self-improvement and quantitative self-limitation can be safely ameliorated,” Leopold concluded (285).

This was both a warning and an obviously racist comment endorsing genocidal consequences. It can also be read as a challenge to the select, young Euro-American audience he was educating. Weren’t they the ones holding both superior intelligence and an ethics of self-limitation, or, at least – given the frustrating contradiction – the ones bearing technological prowess and access to land with the capacity for ethical advancement in support of tools and land use attunement? On the one hand, despite the cause-effect relationship between colonialist exploitation, reduced land capacity, and human suffering, Leopold had suggested not intervening while environmental factors did the job of limiting populations of suffering colonized peoples such as North American and southern African Indigenous Peoples who were racialized as non-white. On the other hand, frustrated with the majority of Euro-American settlers, Leopold’s land ethic also would incorporate Malthusian-influenced contrivances, including qualitative self-improvement, to limit the population density of those racialized as white (e.g., Leopold, Reference Leopold1933; Reference Leopold1949: 220). Moreover, Leopold’s proposals for human density control and human transformation coincided not only with scientific racism but also with the trending paradigm of eugenics.

Malthus’s ideas about resource restraints on otherwise persistent forces of population growth had helped Charles Darwin bring together his theory of evolution by natural selection. Reading in Malthus of “a struggle for existence,” Darwin devised the idea that “favorable variations” of plants and animals “would tend to be preserved,” and “unfavorable” ones “destroyed,” giving rise to new “species” (Seidl and Tisdell, Reference Seidl and Tisdell1999: 398). In the 1930s and 1940s, Darwinian natural selection blended with Mendelian genetics, giving rise to population genetics, wherein “population” became another guise for “race” (Tallbear, 38).Footnote ⁷⁴ This new field of population genetics would study the genetic basis of evolution, including how natural selection changes the genetic composition of localized, interbreeding groups, including human ones.Footnote ⁷⁵ Population genetics intersected with the older field of population ecology, which, as seen in Leopold’s work, explored dynamics between environmental factors and population numbers. This field, fascinated with complex interrelations, was also rooted in Darwinian science. The foci of population ecologists included questions related to threats of extinction and future projections of survival, including of humans.

Meanwhile, since 1900, new developments in genetics also had been revolutionary in the development of eugenics (Turda, Reference Turda, Bashford and Levine2012: 69). Nineteenth-century English scientific scholar Herbert Spencer had coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” to conceptualize Darwinian evolution and applied it to human societies. Social Darwinists (pre-Boas) had considered “culture” (singular) a higher evolutionary stage, characterized, in general, by superior human agency (Tallbear, Reference Tallbear2013: 36). In 1883, Sir Francis Galton launched “eugenics” – from “eugenes” or “good stock” – as a Darwinian science applied to human societies. This field would be “equally applicable to men, brutes, and plants,” Galton argued. Eugenics, he wrote, means “to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had” (Galton, Reference Galton1883: 17). The complexities contained within this definition are vast. The phrase, “of all influences,” is one example. It bears, among others, the challenge of separating what Galton termed “nurture” – “acquired through education and circumstance” – and “nature” – “that which was in the original grain of his constitution” (128). Another example is the enfolding into “a better chance” of the possibilities of both negative and positive influences, respectively, those obstructing the continuance of “the less suitable” stock versus privileging the “more suitable races or strains of blood.”

Evolutionary ornithologist and museum curator Richard Prum argues that, in one way or another, between the 1890s and 1940s “every professional geneticist and evolutionary biologist in the United States and Europe was either an ardent proponent of eugenics, a dedicated participant in eugenic social programs, or a happy fellow traveler. Full stop” (Prum, Reference Prum2017: 326). Leopold touched on his sense of involvement in his 1941 lecture. “Ecology,” he said, “is here only a bystander” to the rising, machine-made threat of “genetical deterioration of the human species.” “Except in this sense,” he continued: ecology “offers abundant testimony that only healthy species achieve continuity” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 282). “There can be no doubt,” Leopold told his students, “that better human stocks, both as to inheritance and environment, are more likely to find a modus vivendi than poorer ones” (286). Hand in hand with his support of negative proposals to manage human densities and his tendering of positive ones to enhance human capacities, Leopold’s belief in better or worse human kinds – with both hereditary (nature) and environmental (nurture) facets – aligned with basic tenets of Galtonian eugenics, intersecting with both scientific racism and ableism. These facets of Leopold’s narratives aligned, albeit often more cautiously, with the far more voluble paradigmatic formulations of prominent, dedicated contemporary eugenicists and/or environmental Malthusians within the large circle of his conservation colleagues.Footnote ⁷⁶

These colleagues included Ellsworth Huntington, president of the American Eugenics Society (1934–38) and author of Tomorrow’s Children; The Goal of Eugenics (Reference Huntingon1935), a rewrite of the “eugenics catechism.” Huntington proposed that eugenics could correct “the present wrong kind of differential birthrate” (10) to “improve mankind” (7). He recommended negative policies to limit the birthrate among the worst and positive measures to increase it among the best, that is, “the native white population” (76). Huntington privileged rural family life, with conditions of health, childhood education, and economic opportunities, as matters important to nurturing the inheritance of desirable “innate capacities” (22), for example, intelligence, self-control, foresight, physical vigor. There was also New York Zoological Society president and Conservation Foundation co-founder, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Jr.Footnote ⁷⁷ Even in the wake of “man’s” wars, Osborn wrote in Our Plundered Planet (Reference Osborn1948), “too many are left alive” (31) and high population density results in declines of persons’ fitness (99). In a later work, Osborn supported the prevention of reproduction by those “who are mentally incompetent or physically defective” (Powell, Reference Powell2015: 219). A third, fellow ecologist Bill Vogt, was among Leopold’s closest colleagues. In Vogt’s The Road to Survival (Reference Vogt1948) a foundation of outspoken Malthusianism intersected with racism and eugenics. For instance, Vogt blamed U.S. colonialist measures to improve health and nutrition in Boriquén (aka Puerto Rico) for rising population accompanied by an ineffective birth control law and increasing misery in this “island slum.” He recommended withholding global aid until the islanders adopted “a rational population policy” (Reference Vogt1948: 77).Footnote ⁷⁸ Linking socially objectionable traits with lineage (Powell, Reference Powell2015: 219), Vogt also thought that states should withhold support from “the senile, the incurables, the insane, the paupers and those who might be called ecological incompetents.” Those who “expedite erosion” and otherwise deteriorate land, Vogt said, were “worse than paupers.” They were “ecological Typhoid Marys,” infecting everyone with “environmental sickness,” whose government subsidized businesses must be “liquidated, at least in part” in the interest of “national survival.” Hurting many in the short run, Vogt proposed, was necessary to prevent more suffering in the future (Reference Vogt1948: 145).

Such perspectives obviously bypass social-structural analyses that incorporate justice. They circumvent access to hosts of valuable teachings related to “exploring and creating new ways of doing things that go beyond able-bodied/minded normativity,” as creative and disability organizer Patricia Berne says (2015). These include how “disabled lands” as well as disabled persons “still dream,” in the words of Russian-born NYC-based ecoartist and disability culture activist Marina Tsaplina.Footnote ⁷⁹ Leopold valorizes land health, taking wilderness and the lands of Northwestern Europe as standards, the latter – co-constituted with its superior people – as “resistant to strain” (Leopold, Reference Leopold1949: 219) and possessing “extraordinary recuperative capacity” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 213). In contrast, he marks down less “tough” lands, which, when abused become “deteriorated” and “despoiled,” “mutilated,” “sick,” “deranged” or “wastage” (Leopold, 1946: 277; Callicott and Freyfogle, Reference Callicott and Freyfogle1999: 172, 219; Leopold, Reference Leopold1949: 219). Similarly, he categorizes the frustrating majority of racialized white Americans as “average,” mob-like on “stampede,” and “mass-minded” in contrast with the minority who are “progressive,” have mental capacity to “see” (at least some) ecological causes and effects, are physically healthy and personally cooperative, and value “primitive arts of wilderness travel” with the conscience to apply “voluntary adherence to an ethical code” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991; Leopold Reference Leopold1946a: 279; Warren, Reference Warren2016: 276; Leopold, Reference Leopold1949: 193–194, 177–178). This divide between seemingly ideal versus imperfect bodies/conditions can disrespect how valuable are traumatized or even just seemingly ordinary lands and persons, as themselves, who hold one another together – right now – in a world of just and “collective liberation … where no body/mind is left behind.”Footnote ⁸⁰

The consensus among scientists is more than a loose association. Huntington, Osborn, Jr., and Vogt and Leopold, to various degrees, expressed mutual appreciation for one another’s contributions.Footnote ⁸¹ The ideas of Leopold and Vogt, in particular, often tracked with one another (Powell, Reference Powell2015: 218; Warren, Reference Warren2016: 168 fn 95; 249 fn 37; 254 fn64; Meine, 495, 523–525).Footnote ⁸² For instance, Leopold praised Vogt’s book as based richly on examining animal analogies for solving “the world’s human populations problems.” He praised it as “the last work on conservation as applied to the world-wide problem of men and land” (Reference Vogt1948).Footnote ⁸³ Leopold may have been more skillful with rhetoric, more cautious, and, as he aged, less certain about most things than many of his colleagues.Footnote ⁸⁴ At the same, throughout his career, there is evidence that Leopold had been developing, in tandem with his land ethic and land health concepts, an ecological-evolutionary model of social change. It appears woven with certain threads of fixed, oppressive assumptions of settler colonial white supremacy, intersecting with environmental Malthusianism and eugenics, into the background of his ecological work.

Leopold’s ecology was a genetics-adjacent model rooted in Darwinian science in support of healthy land and a “healthy [human] species.” In light of the vexing contradiction, the “abundant testimony” of ecology pointed to the need for a land ethic to promote land health and to the need for “an ecological conscience” to carry it. Although sometimes admitting his forlorn hope, Leopold was not one to quit trying (Warren, Reference Warren2016: 255). His model of human change takes up many possibilities. And it seems to manifest in at least two ways at once. On the one hand, encouraging “the love of nature” is an inclusive, tender venture; “ideas are evolving” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 190) and “cultural values” and “ethics” are philosophical abstractions that thus can be altered by choice; ecology is research and wonder, laws are just, and the effects of economic carrots and sticks are just that, economic. On the other hand, Leopold evokes a murkier, nonetheless dynamic social-scientific framework that is racialized, as well as patriarchal, elitist and ableist, with not only environmental (nurture) components but also hereditary (nature) elements.

In these murkier depths, U.S. land owners had become mostly male and white. Leopold was facing the vexing contradiction of run-away technologies mutually deteriorating land and land’s human inhabitants, increasingly worrisome (e.g., Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 184; Leopold Reference Leopold1946a: 277; Freyfogle and Callicott, Reference Callicott and Freyfogle1999: 172). Conservation policies could prevent not only erosion and other land harms, they also could be applied with the eugenics intention to provide greater “economic security and social comfort to a selected group of people,” to use Huntington’s terms, encouraging the best to have “larger families than certain other types” (Reference Huntingon1935: 22–23, 79). Selective measures could be applied not only to control North American and southern African Indigenous populations and within the U.S. via racist miscegenation and nonconsensual sterilizations, but also to help maintain and improve the self-determined supremacy of Euro-American citizens. Negative proposals to prevent damaging land use could be used to selectively undermine the continuance of “less suitable,” that is, unethical Euro-American stock. And positive proposals encouraging beneficial land use could be used to privilege the continuance of their “more suitable [i.e., ethical] races or strains of blood,” in Galton’s terms, even if “indirectly.”

For example, in “Erosion as a Menace” Leopold proposes government inspections for erosion control and to take away land titles from bad land owners (who were unwilling or unable to change) and give them to more “progressive,” good ones within the “Nordic” population. With less specificity, in his 1947 “The Ecological Conscience,” Leopold writes that “decent land-use should be accorded social rewards proportionate to its social importance,” which is utmost. This would help activate “an internal change” at “the foundations of conduct” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 338, 345). And, in his Almanac, Leopold recommends “social approbation for right actions: social disapproval for wrong actions,” again, to help in the “operation” of an evolving land ethic. If the competence of land users had a heritable component and if environment shaped its expression, which, in turn, helped shape land, as Leopold thought, then conservation policies might be applied to improve land and to improve land ethical people, hand in hand, in a positive feedback loop countering the prevalent negative one.

As Huntington wrote, “no one can yet measure character exactly, and the precise contribution of either heredity or environment is problematical” (Reference Huntingon1935: 22–23). For the present, then, it was important to consider both essential in the evolution and/or development of a person or society. Nature and nurture proved hard to separate. In the twentieth century, on the heredity or “nature” end of a spectrum, questions about evolving populations involved geneticists. In a 1933 lecture delivered to scientists in the Southwest, Leopold had raised the question of whether the “mass-mind [i.e., the qualitatively average person] wants to extend its powers of comprehending the world in which it lives, or, granted the desire, has the capacity to do so” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 192). The former question Leopold referred to the German-educated Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, the latter to geneticists, albeit working “with trepidations,” he acknowledged (192; Warren, Reference Warren2016: 248–252).

In a 1935 lecture titled “Land Pathology,” Leopold again noted variations among U.S. conservationists, those with a merely utilitarian view of land, whose foci arose from “individual limitations,” and those with fewer limitations who appreciated both beauty and utility of land (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 213). This was a “cleavage” that carried through into his Almanac in which those who regarded land “as a biota” and/or as “the collective organism” were also experiencing “the stirrings of an ecological conscience” (1949: 221, 223). In Darwinian evolution, individual variations and deviations that were heritable and enhanced an organism’s competitiveness and thus survival would win out and be passed on to future generations, sustaining the population within its shifting ecological environment. Leopold, in an early use of the term “land-ethic” (see Warren, 2016: 149), in 1935, tied variations in human ethical capacities, such as the capacity to comprehend land more or less complexly, directly to intentional, eugenical selection. Although, he acknowledged, the science was still in early stages. The “breeding of ethics is as yet beyond our powers,” Leopold wrote. “All science can do is safeguard the environment in which ethical mutations might take place,” he said, matter-of-factly (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 215).Footnote ⁸⁵ In his 1941 lecture, “Ecology and Politics,” Leopold added that “individuals deviating from ‘normal’” might serves as an “evolutionary ‘safety device’” determining “our continuity” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 286). This might be a silver lining in cases such as the overpopulation of Europe, he suggested. Presumably, the more Europeans the greater chance helpful deviations of heritable “cultural values” would emerge (284).

After World War II, scientists tried to separate themselves from associations with Nazi Germany’s genocidal eugenics. At the same time, the role of environment in determining human behavior and society, which European natural historians and human geographers from the eighteenth century had promoted (Smith, Reference Smith2021), became more prevalent. “Environment” would carry forward terms and schemes of scientific racism and, evidently, eugenics in yet new attire. As early as a 1925 article “Wilderness as a Form of Land Use,” Leopold had linked the “pioneer environment” of early Euro-settlers over the past “three centuries with “the character of our racial stocks” determining “the character of our development” – “the very stuff America is made of” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 137). Leopold thus had been concerned that the end of the frontier meant the end of the wilderness meant the end of Americans. Referring to the recurring self-exterminating potato bug story while approving of a proposal of the Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky, Leopold was explicit about the opposite possibility: that “the determining characteristic of rational beings is that their evolution is self-directed,” individually and collectively (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 137, 142). By 1947, in “The Ecological Conscience,” Leopold was still proposing self-directed evolution yet with “no illusions” about how fast a land ethical society could “become functional” contra Galton’s belief in the best “strains,” given the chance, “prevailing speedily.” Leopold, nonetheless, was clear about where society should head – “throw your weight around on matters of right and wrong in land use,” he said (345–6). This would be to preserve the environment that made and would not only sustain, but could keep improving people.

The role of environment also tended to the “nurture” side of the spectrum, including attention to relations of heredity and social systems and the importance of outdoor recreation and education (Turda, Reference Turda, Bashford and Levine2012: 73). Leopold’s grand narrative of ecological-evolutionary progress toward a land ethic put the biological and hereditary component of a human conscience into relationship with ecological land management, or land doctoring. In a sense, then, Leopold analogized not only in terms of animal populations but in terms of the larger purview of his scientific endeavor to tune capacities of animals to capacities of land. In Game Management Leopold proposed “the love of sport,” hunting in particular, for those who possessed it, as capable of expanding into/with a conviction. The outdoorsman, that is, might come to understand that the human capacity to use land well rather than a high population density – which deteriorated the quality of both land and its human members – was the “true test” of whether “the average citizen” was “civilized,” Leopold proposed. The “practice of game management” and the development of a “culture which will meet this test,” accordingly, were the same thing (392, 423).

Furthermore, the desire to hunt, Leopold believed, involved an “instinct” for “combat” linked with “the biological basis of human nature” (391).Footnote ⁸⁶ Thanks to what he regarded as the more recent inventions of agriculture and commerce for food supply, subsistence hunting – viewed as merely driven by hunger – could be superseded by a higher form. Sport hunting, that is, could be more advanced in “cultural value” (1949: 181) by virtue of adding an ethical component of self-limitation. That is, the hunter did not (need to) kill everything he could. In fact, the fewer mechanized gadgets the better for ethical development, Leopold suggested (Reference Leopold1933: 391–392; Reference Leopold1949: 166, 178–180). That the inborn “ethical code” varied from hunter to hunter, according to Leopold, signaled that the advancement was still in progress thus offering a potential point of management intervention (391–392). Self-limitation, in those already predisposed, that is, might be expanded – via “recreational engineering” meaning “the development of the perceptive faculty in Americans” (Reference Leopold1949: 173, 174) – to express a similar conviction regarding the greater ecological capacity of land. From Daniel-Booneing to hunting and wilderness travel to the higher level, non-consumptive activities of nature study, wildlife research, and husbandry (173, 175, 185), supporting land health, including all degrees and sizes of wilderness, would further support the mutual improvement of wildlife and recreationalists, as Leopold continued to reckon in his Almanac. “In my opinion,” Leopold wrote, “the promotion of wildlife research sports is the most important job confronting the profession of wildlife management.” Promoting ecology as outdoor recreation would encourage the “search in animal populations for analogies to our own [population] problems.” This was important to solving the vexing contradiction. It was “important to the whole human enterprise,” Leopold continued to emphasize (186–187).Footnote ⁸⁷

As a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, Leopold, in terms similar to those in Game Management, proposed, in a 1939 letter, that conservation education should “not stop at teaching techniques of biology and land use.” It should, likewise, “bridge the gap between land use and human culture” (Warren, Reference Warren2016: 269). That bridge he believed to be land ethical thinking and behavior. In a 1937 “Science Inquiry” publication, Leopold, who had chaired the report committee, reiterated that such an ethic was tied to a variable hereditary element within his target population, which were mostly Euro-American white, male students.Footnote ⁸⁸ “Interest in wildlife is a racial inheritance. It does not persist in all individuals,” the report said. “Where it does persist,” it continued, “its cultivation and development are generally believed to be conducive to the ‘good life’” (Leopold et al., Reference Leopold, chairman, Cole, Fassett, Chancey Juday and Wagner1937: 26; Warren, Reference Warren2016: 272). Below the surface of such thoughtful, well-meaning ideas was the suggestion of selecting and nurturing future ecological-ethical land managers in evolutionary and eugenics senses. The next year Leopold took charge of drafting a statement of qualifications for “The Wildlife Society,” newly minted, a sign of his expanding profession. This draft proposed to define a wildlife student in terms of “What He Is” alongside other criteria. Choice candidates cum graduates, for example, “should have” a “reasonably sound physique” and be “cooperative”; have a “better-than-average scholastic record”; already display “habitual self-teaching” (particularly in natural history); and, most importantly to Leopold, have the sort of “mind,” which “defies” the “best efforts of all committees” to define and was “the aim of all education, including wildlife” (Warren, Reference Warren2016: 277–278).Footnote ⁸⁹

In the Almanac, Leopold would urge that the “content” of conservation education define “right or wrong” in land use, assign “obligation,” call for “sacrifice,” and advance “change in the current philosophy of values” (1949: 207–208). He tied obligations to conscience and to the need to extend “social conscience from people to land.” This extension called for an “internal change” reaching to the “foundations of conduct,” the foundations from which spring “philosophy and religion” (209–210). The “evolution of a land ethic,” Leopold stressed, “is an intellectual as well as emotional process” (225). It was an “affair of the mind as well as the heart,” as he had written in “The Ecological Conscience,” that “implies a capacity to study and learn, as well as to emote about the problems of conservation” (Callicott and Flader, Reference Flader1991: 343). And that subject matter and those problems were complex. Leopold knew of “at least one certainty: the trend of evolution is to elaborate and diversify the biota” (1949: 216). Meanwhile, he explained, with increased “population density” and “the efficiency of tools,” “modes of cooperation” for his powerful society had also become more complex (1949: 202). It was “a truism,” Leopold wrote in his Almanac, “that as the ethical frontier advances from the individual to the community, its intellectual content increases” (225). This “affair” would take affection for and access to land, yes, but also an expansive and expanding “thinking” capacity (225) – a capacity that might be educated as well as inherited and thus managed – to use land skillfully and also to “release the evolutionary process for an ethic” (224).Footnote ⁹⁰

Expanding alongside this educational-evolutionary need, too, was the “development of the sciences,” in the terms of Herbert Spencer. To Spencer’s “natural sequence – from physics to sociology – Leopold added ecology as “the last science,” that is, the most complex one. Ecology, “the sociology of the biota,” was to be “predictive” and contribute to “social wisdom” (e.g., Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 305; Callicott and Freyfogle: Reference Callicott and Freyfogle1999, 219–220; Warren Reference Warren2016: 271). Ecology was related at a “right angle” to biological evolution (Warren, Reference Warren2016: 12), useful as something like “the frog in a railroad switch,” which ends up “routing the world’s traffic”Footnote ⁹¹ Leopold’s was a grand scheme, something like a new religion, or replacement for religion. He left behind, at his passing, plans for a new textbook on the field (Warren, Reference Warren2016: 350). Ecology – with teeth – would help build “receptivity into the still unlovely human mind” by the arts of skilled land managers of “perception” (1949: 177). For this, it would take educating choice students as future ecological managers and educators.

For Leopold, as for others in his scientific circles, an educational challenge was purposefully “creating such men” who would be the “right people” for the job of teaching future generations, as Leopold put it in a January 5, 1948 correspondence with his close colleague, Roberts Mann.Footnote ⁹² A land manager and fervent educator, Mann, in a letter dated December 16, 1947, had conveyed his concern to Leopold, quoting geneticist and demographer Robert C. Cook.Footnote ⁹³ Conservation education, that is, might help prevent soil erosion by staving off “genetic erosion,” in Cook’s terms. “Soil is important, surely,” he had written, “but what will it profit us to build a paradise for imbeciles.” Cook, a contributor to Huntington’s eugenics book, Tomorrow’s Children, esteemed both nature and nurture in his thinking. He urged attention to human breeding, controlling human population, as well as teaching the “interrelationship of all things in nature, including man himself.” Mixed with the biological and ecological were eugenicist and racist elements Mann had stressed in his letter, linking, also in his own words, “the education of our children” with the “future of our natural resources, and, therefore, of our human resources.” Leopold, just months before his passing, had written to Mann: “I find myself completely in sympathy with what you say in your letter,” which he would circulate “to our university committee on this very subject.”Footnote ⁹⁴ I find no record of Leopold eschewing the troubling elements within the correspondence, which, albeit in his own more cautious ways, he himself had promoted. Even were there evidence of Leopold coming to resist eugenics and all forms of scientific oppression, as he had other harmful aspects of his culture and, even if he had lived long enough to do so, settler-colonialist power structures remain integrated into his writings and thus into any ongoing conservation legacies that do not question them.

Taken together, Leopold’s vexing contradiction took up with a eugenics framework within a racist system. Within its own self-determined supreme culture, it sorts out those with better and worse genetic endowments and privileges, as most qualified, those already nurtured by colonial land-privilege (i.e., a “farm background” versus of “modern city life” in Mann’s words (2); “rural betterment” in Huntington’s terms (75); “pre-existing [outdoor] skill,” “familiarity” with “farming” or “other land industries,” and “natural history” experience in Leopold’s [Warren, Reference Warren2016: 277]).Footnote ⁹⁵ This scheme casts shade on otherwise well-meaning recreational or scholarly education in caring, ecological understanding and in land health. It is to decide – with normalized, unjust arrangements intact – who continues to have access to land, and in what condition – who inherits it, for better or worse, and who doesn’t.

Two years before Leopold’s correspondence with Mann, The Journal of Heredity (an arm of the American Genetic Association), had republished a condensed version of an important essay by Leopold. “The Conservation Ethic,” originally published in the Journal of Forestry in 1933, the year of Game Management’s publication. In 1946, the essay had been renamed “Racial Wisdom and Conservation.” The editor of The Journal of Heredity was none other than Robert C. Cook. The introduction was addressed to “We people of the United States,” a white readership. The framing stressed ecological interrelationship and credited Leopold’s work as presenting “a scheme of concepts and relationships which could form … [the] background” of “any awakening of a popular interest in eugenics.” That is, it could help motivate “an attitude akin to the religious” or “a new faith,” which Sir Francis Galton himself had called for, aimed at “the conservation of our race” (1946: 275).Footnote ⁹⁶ By the 1940s, Leopold had become increasingly aware of the complexity of land relations and far less sanguine about figuring out and manipulating “which levers to pull” to control them (Warren Reference Warren2016: 130, 182). He knew that, faced with “so many conflicting needs,” he did not have “a completely logical [conservation] philosophy all thought out” (Warren 264). At the same time, he was becoming more convinced of the need for “internal change” or “an ecological conscience” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 338) and more pessimistic about whether and how long it would take to evolve (345, Warren, Reference Warren2016: 255). Nor did he give up on sweeping narratives, which are prone to become totalizing, even fascistic.Footnote ⁹⁷ While Leopold remained uncertain on whether and how geneticists and demographers and other social scientists would work out how to shorten evolutionary time to generate a functional land ethic, he did not disavow the possibility of eugenics. Waiting, he kept it at hand to mesh with potential remedies for the present moment.

Some rote portions of Leopold’s Reference Leopold1933/1946 essay, others with minor changes, and key themes would remain integral to “The Land Ethic” and other parts of his Almanac.Footnote ⁹⁸ The historical, ethical sequence, beginning with Odysseus, sets up all versions of the essay, which is a response, post-frontier – to the failures of various conservation-minded measures to guide or control private land users to protect public interests in land. The essay grapples with the realities of the evolutionary, co-determinations of conditions of humans, societies and environments, but not enslavement and colonization of Africans; with “dark and bloody ground,” Boone, and the agency of Europeans and bluegrass, but not “the Native Indians;” with human “density” and Earth’s “saturation,” but not land theft and economic marginalization; with limits of “mass-mind” and intentions to nurture and bequeath, biologically, greater capacity; with science’s importance, stressing ecology, remedial, predictive, and applied – so often to “step beyond ‘science’ in the narrow sense” (Freyfogle and Callicott, 1999: 226) – for bettering “society” yet still incorporating images and animal analogies threaded with bias into solving land-use problems while leaving unquestioned Homo sapiens’s kingship or “dominion” – whether “self-perpetuating” or “self-destructive” – leaving intact assumptions of heteropatriarchal white supremacy. The essay versions articulate, as does the final paragraph of Leopold’s Almanac, the vexing contradiction: “We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam shovel” (1946: 278; Reference Leopold1949: 226).

Facing the vexing contradiction, there, in Leopold’s unbridged “gap between land use and human culture,” were and are entire Indigenous Nations, Black and more racialized non-white, disabled, women, and otherwise suppressed people. It is difficult to imagine stable coalitions based on such erroneous conceptions of commonality between many North American Indigenous and Leopoldian “practical models for ethics,” in Whyte’s terms. “Many Indigenous ethics and knowledge systems have critical feedback loops built into them” and, like the Anishinaabe Water Walk, connect with on-the-ground “social justice transformations” and “anti-colonial action,” he notes (Reference Whyte, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2024). Whereas, a Leopoldian model of ethical change privileges the “best” Euro-Americans and menaces others as if doing so is disconnected from menacing land. Leopold’s colonialist, conservationist model suppresses Indigenous presence – relegating and assimilating persons while taking homelands, and, as we shall see, surreptitiously appropriating shards of knowledge. Moreover, it turns out there is at least one prerequisite for participation in Leopold’s “thinking community” in which a land ethic may evolve – that is, members must have minds with the capacity to think (225). Leopold’s model of change assumes that this capacity inheres within Euro-Americans, albeit to greater and lesser degrees, but not, likewise, within Indigenous persons and other animals and beings who appear to him, if they appear at all, to lack intentional ethics, scientific knowledge systems, and/or innovative technologies. There may remain much to avow in Leopoldian narratives, including affection for land, challenging mere utilitarianism and “resource” extraction, and the humility of uncertainty that envisions people, open to change, thinking together. In the murkier underneath, however, Leopold’s model recommends unethical extremes to bring about ethical improvement – from withholding medicine from other people’s children to ranking the fitness of his own society’s offspring and differentially privileging them. It calls for inhumanities in order to keep the ground underneath an Empire’s dominion rather than to achieve justice in earth inheritance.

3.3 Epistemological Privilege: It Is Absurd

Leopold as much as anyone understood that thoughts have consequences. Indeed, I would almost say it became a mantra. “A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land,” Leopold wrote in the Almanac essay “Axe-in-Hand” (Leopold, Reference Leopold1949: 68). In “The Land Ethic,” he put it directly: “As a land-user thinketh, so is he” (Leopold, Reference Leopold1949: 225).Footnote ⁹⁹ “An ethic,” he explained in that essay, “presupposes the existence of some mental image of land as a biotic mechanism.” The popular “balance of nature” concept, Leopold suggested, was not an apt symbol because it conjured a too-simple and too-static weighing scale. A “truer picture” or “image” of complex land, he proposed – in his 1939 essay “A Biotic View of Land” and in the center of “The Land Ethic”—was a “biotic pyramid.” This biotic or “land pyramid” became a core, organizing, ecological image of land health to which the land ethic pointed. It would be “a common concept,” Leopold hoped, motivating and coordinating the social and natural sciences as well as land users in common cause (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 273). “We can be ethical,” Leopold asserted, “only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in” (Leopold, Reference Leopold1949: 214). It follows, then, that not seeing, feeling, understanding, loving, or otherwise having faith in someone – whether Boricuas, southern Africans, African Americans, Latinas/os, Chinese, and/or distinct North American Indigenous Peoples – as they represent themselves – is itself an elimination with violent consequences. By the racist-colonialist crafting of wilderness conceptually, politically and physically, Leopold undercuts the ethical value of his “perfect norm” for land health. Removing and/or devaluing the presences of time immemorial land citizens from his mental image of land also undermines its ecological validity and that of scientific work that does not question this – an epistemic problem.

In the section of “The Land Ethic” detailing “The Land Pyramid” Leopold explained in the Almanac that “soil-oak-deer-Indian is a chain that has now been largely converted to soil-corn-cow-farmer” (Leopold, Reference Leopold1949: 215). As discussed also in the previous section, humans, variously, were integral to Leopold’s ethical land health vision. Leopold studied and defended interrelations of soils, oaks, and deer integrated, he hoped, with “a new kind of farmer” (Warren, Reference Warren2016: 420 fn114). As we are seeing from various angles, he did not, likewise, show faith in Native people, as valued and “thinking” human members of long “lines of dependency” (Leopold, Reference Leopold1949: 215), including many hunters and many farmers of more regenerative and/or productive methods and technologies compared with many Euro-American ones (Dunn, Reference Dunn1994; Mt. Pleasant, Reference Mt. Pleasant2011).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The conversion of one chain into another explicitly assumes the elimination of Indigenous Peoples and does so without addressing injustice and respectful regard for the rippling consequences. Taking Leopold’s norm as the ethical and practical standard for coalition-making is inapt. How could anyone expect Indigenous persons to express and legitimate, in Whyte’s terms, “their systems of knowledge production” (Reference Whyte, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2024) through a perspective that eliminates them and/or their thinking and is also therefore epistemologically troubled, for example, in gathering thus biased, unreliable observations? Any such expectation “can grant unsubstantiated and even offensive privilege,” in Whyte’s terms, “in relation to Indigenous ethics.” Doing so, indeed, “will have already suppressed them before dialogue has even begun” (Whyte, Reference Whyte, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2024). Where would be any chance for reciprocity, procedural justice, or stable coalitions when, for Indigenous people, “a common concept” of land means ongoing oppression besides untrustworthy “truth”?

Against their powerful resistance, the Apache Tribes were violently removed to military reservations by U.S. government agents, including from Leopold’s forestry district – that is, from their ecologies, in which they would have been, in Leopold’s terms, a “link in many chains” of dependency. Those government boundaries had also restrictively appropriated the areas of Buffalo hunts when there were still Buffalos.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Regardless of Apache compliance, in 1864, their citizens had been slaughtered by U.S. federal troops to make way for statehoods of the southwestern territories in which Leopold’s career had begun. Though ruthlessly reduced in number by Euro-settlers, Apache and Buffalo lived and live on in resurgence.Footnote ¹⁰² Leopold had not named Apache in his 1923 essay as one of the “races” or “cultures” leaving “the earth alive, undamaged” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 96). Merely implicitly, and shudderingly, he does so in his 1937 essay “Conservationist in Mexico.” Here, Leopold begins by attributing healthier land in “Chihuahua” to settlers’ fears of Apache, which, ironically, protected land from themselves. “The predatory Apache of our Southwest,” Leopold wrote, “was early rounded up and confined in reservations, whereas across the line in Mexico he was, until his recent near-extinction, allowed to run at large. Therefore our southwestern mountains are now badly gutted by erosion, whereas the Sierra Madre range across the line still retains the virgin stability of its soils and all the natural beauty that goes with the enviable condition” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 239).

Here Leopold repeats a pattern. As also discussed in Section 3.1, he relegates Apache Tribes not only as inconvenient parts of wilderness, physically, but outside (superior) humanity, conceptually, and thus outside of intentional land-keeping ethics and intelligence as he did other wildlife, including carnivores. That is, when “allowed to run at large,” “predatory” Apache prevented rapacious settlers (also without a land ethic, but with the capacity to evolve and intentionally innovate) from ruining the “virgin stability” of the Sierra Madre. As Mvskoke-Creek, Cheraw, Cherokee, Jewish, and Euro-American descendant, scholar and Native seed conservationist Noah Schlager argues, implicit in Leopold’s observations, as a Yale-trained forest manager, is the view that “a forest without Indians is better than a forest with Indians, which is better than a barren mountainside.” This valuation, present in the U.S. conservation movement from the start, Schlager stresses, and woven into Leopold’s narratives, is a political legacy with very real on-the-ground, anti-Indigenous consequences.Footnote ¹⁰³ It is also an epistemological legacy denying, assimilating, and/or appropriating credit for Indigenous knowledge production and sustainable land use while continuing to insist that Euro-Americans know and can do better.

Schlager finds a “most damning” remark of Leopold’s in a 1909 letter to his brother *explicit content follows*: “The only hunting I’ve done this month,” Leopold complained, “is for Indians. We caught a bunch in poaching and did some night-maneuvers – regular Daniel Boone style – but the s-of-bs got away from us. Old red and I chased them licked split plumb to the reservation line, but they foxed us for fair and got one of our horses to boot, Old Red buck I was going to buy him too, and sure hate to give him up.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This letter also verifies that Leopold had understood Daniel Boone to be a hunter of “Indians” when he mentioned him in “The Conservation Ethic,” “Racial Wisdom and Conservation,” and, later, in “Wildlife in American Culture” and “The Land Ethic” in his Almanac.

A particularly telling instance of on-the-ground anti-Indigenous consequences of Leopold’s anti-Indigenous political and epistemological relegations was his mid-1910s alignment with the unsuccessful U.S. effort to appropriate a 2,000-acre marsh within the Jicarilla-Apache Indian Reservation for a federal bird refuge. A “paradise,” he called it, of “grassy shores … blue mountain sky … Just solid ducks” (Brown and Carmony, 1990: 25). The ethics and knowledge production of Jicarilla-Apache that aligned with this flourishing are not considered. Meanwhile, Hornaday-style, before they had parted ways on refuge management, Leopold had wanted to fence the marsh (to protect nests from wandering cows and sheep), prohibit hunting, and “clean out the varmints” that is, “predatory animals” (26, 27). Leopold hoped thus to double the “crop” of birds as a source that would overflow into other areas. “Nobody lives there,” Leopold wrote, so “why not? … It will benefit all and hurt nobody” (26). There were plenty of other shooting grounds, he said. By to “benefit all,” he meant to benefit a public beyond a group of “twenty wealthy Colorado sportsmen” who wanted it as a shooting club (Brown and Carmony, 1990: 25–32; 27; Cryer, Reference Cryer2015). Leopold’s “nobody lives there” was to imagine the very real intended removal of Jicarilla Apache, whom he knew were at home with that marsh, in order to support more settlers’ enjoyment.

In a later settler fantasy set across that U.S.-Mexican border in homelands of Apache and more Tribes that were still “so lovely” and with “virgin stability” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991: 239) – Leopold renders an almost poetic expression of Schlager’s thesis as well as of “The Biotic Pyramid” food chain conversion. Leopold, in the Almanac’s “Song of the Gavilan,” imagines an old buck, a great oak, and the ancient masonry of an “old Indian”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ – now ghostly – flooded by energy as a wilderness centerpiece – a symbolic structure of a dynamic biotic pyramid. It is of course a symbol of Leopold’s common concept of land, central to that of land health. Leopold saw the buck and himself as “actors in an [eternal] allegory” (Leopold: Reference Leopold1949, 151; Warren, Reference Warren2016: 223–226). Underpinning the allegory, again, is the elimination of Indigenous inhabitants – their charming technologies appearing at the same time they are disappearing in the dim light of some mythical past – with settler bodies and ecologies as replacements.

A third example of anti-Indigenous appropriation along with assimilation is particularly knotty, explicitly involving Indigenous land and Indigenous scientific-ecological knowledge. In this case, Leopold discredits Indigenous expertise while later taking credit for it. Leopold’s 1920 article, “’Piute [sic] Forestry’ vs. Forest Fire Prevention,” was an unusually sloppy piece of work, full of both uncited and also ungrounded claims. The essay was laced with condescending inaccuracies regarding Paiute Peoples (see also Lefler, Reference Lefler2014). “It is, of course, absurd,” Leopold wrote, “to assume that [‘the California’] Indians fired the forests with any idea of forest conservation in mind” (Brown and Carmony, 1990: 141). Demeaning ethical-scientific knowledges of Paiute, Leopold alleged that all presumably Euro-settler “old-timers” knew that “the Indian” burned forests simply in order to get game to stand still. He followed this with still other affronts: “A bunch of deer with their heads in the air waiting for a fire,” Leopold claimed, “presented an easy mark, even [italics mine] to the Indian’s bow and arrow.” It was, he continued, “this fact and not any desire for fancied forest conservation which caused the Indians to burn forests” (Brown and Carmony, 1990: 142). Alongside the slur on Paiute hunting skill and technology, this so-called fact Leopold asserted about fire was completely unfounded. Indeed, as Schlager points out, Paiute have a long oral history of intentional burns for fire management as well as for hunting (2018). Leopold concluded his article with an accusation that the “light burning” practiced by Paiute had “destructive effects.” These included “valuable forests … gradually reverted to brush,” with destroyed reproductive potential. According to Leopold, it was prevention of forest fires by the USFS, for which he worked, that was now bringing back regeneration.

Four years later, Leopold revisited fire ecology in “Grass, Brush, Timber, and Fire in Southern Arizona” (Flader and Callicott, Reference Flader and Callicott1991:114–122). He corrected his earlier mistaken scientific assertions with quite brilliant analyses. He admitted that “lightning and Indians kept the brush thin” with fires before “settlement of the country.” The method of light burning, Leopold explained, “gave grass the upper hand … this grass prevented [soil] erosion (115–116). In other words, although the landscape was altered, it remained intact and fertile. It was the settlers – as Leopold characteristically critiqued his own culture’s poor land-use – who caused the grass to be removed by “great herds of livestock” (116). Grass had prevented fire, while grazing released ungrazeable brush and set fertility downhill, with ground succeeding into revivals of fire-vulnerable piñon woodlands, moreover, likely reducing some game numbers.

Leopold concluded with a sleight of hand that retrieved any credit he might have attributed to the Paiute. He wrote that “the virgin condition previous to settlement” was not a “climax” condition of forest but “a temporary type due to some kind of damage” (italics mine) (116). With this stunning phrasing, Leopold disappeared the Paiute (at least as logical-ethical human beings), since “virgin” meant “uninhabited” (at least by “Christians” or racialized white people), and ready for taking, to many white settlers, including conservationists. At the same time, he implicitly blamed the Paiute for a “damaged” landscape. But this directly contradicts what he had just remarked, “grass prevented erosion.” Leopold neither acknowledged nor tried to repair his past mistakes and offenses. Furthermore, he assimilated into his own work supposedly “new” knowledge appropriated from the Paiute, who for many generations had collaborated with forces of fire-plant-soil interrelations.

Left unquestioned, Leopold’s claims perpetuate a swelling historical narrative of Euro-American moral and knowledge-based ascendancy rooted in an entitled pioneer “cultural inheritance” and ecological-evolutionary improvement of land and people via conservation. This appears, in Whyte’s words, as “literally the exact reverse of what numerous contemporary Indigenous people would see as the evolution of their ethics” (2024). As detailed in the previous Section 3.2, faced with the vexing contradiction of self-determined Euro-American superiority side by side with land ruination, Leopold’s model of change enmeshes with Malthusian and eugenic concepts and relations that are also racist. This is a model contrary to Indigenous ones “connected to social justice transformations,” which Whyte discusses. As highlighted in this section, Leopold’s ecological concept of complex land at once writes out and appropriates from Indigenous “systems of ethics and knowledge production,” in Whyte’s words, with very real on-the-ground anti-Indigenous consequences, in Schlager’s terms. Erasing Indigenous people, their systems of knowledge production, and actions based on them undercuts settler sciences operating on such a model. It does so while continuing to procedurally suppress those Indigenous knowledge systems that, in Whyte’s terms, “have critical feedback loops built into them” and to suppress “self-critical” contemporary Indigenous Peoples who “have their own ideas about how to integrate Western science with their traditions” (Reference Whyte, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2024). Such issues, as Whyte says, “complicate any attempt to compare versions of Leopoldian and Indigenous ethics” and “must be reckoned with by any actual attempts to bring people together around the idea of a similar orientation to environmental ethics” (Whyte, Reference Whyte, Rawlinson and Ward2015: 8, 11; Reference Whyte, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2024) on the way to possibly bringing about any genuine, stable coalitions – if not any “thinking community” (Leopold, Reference Leopold1949: 225) – of “people of all heritages” (Whyte, Reference Whyte, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2024).

5.1 Indigenous Histories: Many Names, Many Languages

Leopold aimed to reverse his dominating culture’s land-ruining assumptions by extending a historic narrative of progress to incorporate good land use. Pioneers spread and hammered out “America” from “raw wilderness,” Leopold asserted. Now that “mechanization assured us of a good breakfast,” watching television, and with “the whole world” being “so greedy for more bathtubs” (1949: vii–ix), he argued, survival relied on his assimilative notion of Homo sapiens evolving their first land ethic. This, he went on to project, was occurring stepwise, with moral regard expanding from relations of man-to-man and man-to-society to man-society-land-community relations. The ethically expanded community would further appropriate “tag-ends” of wilderness, in other words, customary geographies of Indigenous Peoples – that is, of citizens of self-governing, politically distinct, land-based peoplehoods pre-existing any invasion or colonization (Kimmerer, Reference Kimmerer2013: 214–215; Whyte Reference Whyte2014: 144; Kolopenuk, Reference Kolopenuk2020: S24) – who were to be relegated by assimilation and death (with the exception of a few protected few tag-ends of themselves). These stolen, relationally disrupted ecologies were to be taken as the “most perfect norm” by which to gauge improvements in land use. For Leopold, Alaska was a “blank place,” albeit a valuable one. It was a vast, “virgin country,” casting, in Robert Service’s words, “the spell of the Yukon” on visitors. And many of those visitors, even today, may think the poet captured the spell in his account of lone, “nameless men,” “nameless rivers,” and “strange valleys” (Leopold, Reference Leopold1949: 176, 191; Service, 1909; see also Smith, Reference Smith2021).Footnote ¹⁰⁹

In summer 2019, along the banks of the Yukon River, I gathered with Indigenous people – many whose names I already knew from living in traditional territories of the lower Tanana Dene Peoples and the Dena’ina Peoples occupied by Fairbanks, Alaska. Here, generations of Indigenous Peoples have lived for millennia, from time immemorial, on still-unceded lands, and they are still here, distinct from the U.S. and Canadian empires surrounding them. That June, I attended the first Arctic Indigenous Climate Summit organized by the Gwich’in Steering Committee directed by Bernadette Demientieff (Gwich’in Steering Committee, 2020). It was hosted by her village of Gwich’yaa Zhee (Fort Yukon, Alaska), one of some fifteen communities of the Gwich’in Nation, spread along the vast arctic migration route of vadzaih (the Porcupine Caribou Herd), which crosses the current U.S.-Canada border. “We [Gwich’in] believe that we each have a piece of caribou in our heart and the caribou have a piece of us in their heart,” Demientieff has said.Footnote ¹¹⁰ There was “a vow,” she explains, “that we would always take care of each other” (16).

On the third day of the gathering, Enei Begaye, executive director of Native Movement, called participants together under an Octagon canopy. She invited us there to share in an activity created by Yup’ik elders of the Mamterilleq (Bethel) region. Begaye noted that she did so with the consent of Rose Domnick, whom she knew as one such elder and community leader, who had taught it to her. With Begaye’s consent, I pass on this abbreviated depiction. The activity had much more to it than can be shared here.Footnote ¹¹¹

Begaye placed a drum on the ground. This drum represents the core, she explained, beginning an ethical narrative that runs directly counter to the Leopoldian one. This core is everything that connects to Mother Earth. It centers many Indigenous worldviews, she said.

Begaye is Diné (Navajo) and Tohono O’odham, a mother with a Neets’aii Gwich’in partner. Earlier, Begaye also had retold a story passed on from some of her grandparents. They recalled them saying that when Dene/Athabascan Peoples of the north and south meet – maybe as in their partnership, and as in what is happening here at the Summit – it would mean the end of the world.Footnote ¹¹² This would mean, they clarified, that so much change had occurred that the formerly recognizable world was finished. This finish, I surmised from Begaye’s story-telling, sounded like the consequence of disconnections within Mother Earth, a severed core, empty of Earth’s self.

Back under the Octagon, Begaye lifted the drum from the ground and placed it aside.

Without Indigenous values beautifully threading human activities into the weft of the Land, nothing holds the core together, they explained. The void left in the center was surrounded by a ring of children surrounded by a ring of women with an orbit of men behind them, having the others’ backs, the backs of the outer ring exposed to outside the circle, beyond.

Begaye next asked the seated children to leave. Their departure, they explained, replayed the forced relegation of many of their grandparents and great-grandparents from their communities into distant boarding schools meant to assimilate them into English-speaking settler culture.Footnote ¹¹³

“What’s happening? Where are we going?” asked one child, distracted by a five-week-old puppy snuggling in their sweatshirt.

Then Begaye walked around the circle, tapping shoulders. First the women, then the men. The tapped ones stepped away. This reenacted the further erosion of many Indigenous communities via historic and ongoing traumas. These included settler-brought diseases, murders, and kidnappings – especially of missing girls and women. Forced sterilizations. The overuse of drugs and alcohol, suicides – especially by young men. Poisoned air and warming climate tied with stolen children, appropriated and looted lands, alienation from ancestral land-valuing responsibilities, prohibited songs, stifled language, ruthless assimilation into a foreign tongue, forbidden country foods, shackled values and fragmented knowledge systems, shattered identities, griefs over lost loved ones.Footnote ¹¹⁴

As the circles broke apart, my throat contracted. I heard others quietly sobbing. This IS the end of the world. Words – “there is no core” – involuntarily, I felt, came out of my mouth.

Begaye brought us back together to talk a bit more. Then we all took a break.

I walked slowly to the river and dipped my fingers into one small eddy. I heard the frontlines echo – “water is life.”

The representation of Mother Earth’s connective core by a drum felt carefully chosen. In positive decolonizing inversion – now the restless songs awake, Begaye encouraged. And Native languages lead Indigenous Peoples back. Speaking her welcome in reclaimed Iñupiatun, Siqiñiq Maupin, co-founder and first director of Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic (www.silainuat.org), spoke of “Iñupiaq values.” “It is respect for nature,” they said, “respect for others, and our sacred relationship with the bowhead whale, with our tuttu, is something that I work really hard to bring to the surface again, because it’s sleeping, that relationship.” Maupin urged that it is time to wake up and reconnect and protect what is left, while “we can still change, and we can still get our animals to be healthy again.” They entreated with a caution. “But if we continue to go down the path that we know is not right in our hearts we’re going to see changes that are irreversible and that’s what pushes me” (Gwich’in Steering Committee, 2020: 44–45).Footnote ¹¹⁵

Within community, as Maupin helped me hear, many are healing back into the millennia-long old-new adaptive legacy of ancestral relationships in Arctic lifescapes broken by outsiders. It is not as if they are evolving toward some land ethic that Iñupiat and other relations had never had.

For me, as a Euro-American-settler trained in Leopoldian conservation, to be welcomed into this gathering of deep knowledge-sharing and feeling was a generosity that calls forth my own responsibility. I will/keep listening to learn how to be supportive in relations with Iñupiaq/t, Gwich’in, Diné, Tohono O’odham, and other Indigenous persons and Peoples on the way to Land and cultural rematriation and just and re/generative prosperity that somehow enmeshes all of us.

5.2 Indigenous Inheritance: Enacting Ecologies, Languages, Story

Leopold’s ecological ethical vision projected a grand narrative of historical-evolutionary moral ascension that runs counter to many Indigenous stories of ethical-relational continuity with the Land. It also projected a manifest destiny project involving genocide, racist population control and/or eugenics as forms of appropriating land from future generations. Future generations, whether as dispossessed or unborn, could not “inherit” it. His sweeping narrative maintained relegation of Native Peoples into reservations (in Alaska, rather, a complex organization of for-profit corporations, villages, and urbanization).Footnote ¹¹⁶ It perpetuated the assimilative force, into ideal white epistemologies and other Euro-American ideals, of land allotment policies and child-imprisoning schools. Settler-colonial ideals echoed from supremacist culture in the vexingly contradictory land-ruining “progress” – with technological innovations outpacing ethical ones – which Leopold criticized. Those ideals echoed as well in conservation modes he helped invent intending to improve people.

Leopold proposed re-engineering the Euro-American population rather than recognize that eliminating Indigenous Peoples – from his models and from their homelands – continued deepening rather than bridging the problematic “gap” between land misuse and ethical human culture. Conservation, including Leopoldian conservation, as well as profit-driven industry, albeit with crucial differences, involved destruction in order to rebuild colonial forms of desire. As Noah Schlager put it, white settler conservation and its still-influential Leopoldian legacy embedded a violently anti-Indigenous narrative from the start –“a forest without Indians is better than a forest with Indians, which is better than a barren mountainside.” Without questioning white supremacist and colonialist power structures – Leopoldian models of change, intended for good – would continue reinscribing on-the-ground oppressions of Indigenous Peoples, racialized Black and Brown people, especially women, LGBTQIA+ and/or disabled persons, children, and/or even white people deemed merely “mass-minded” or “average.”

At a Bureau of Land Management [BLM] hearing in Fairbanks in winter 2019, Indigenous persons – including Gwich’in, Iñupiaq, and Ahtna – voiced deep knowledge of all-too-familiar settler-colonial logic and duplicity. This logic was ingrained not only within the BLM’s resource-based, intergenerational mission promising to sustain “the health, diversity, and productivity of public lands.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ It also was instilled in many conservationists’ desire to conserve land even in less utilitarian-extractive ways and in more Leopoldian ones, that is, as wilderness protectors. Many such conservationists wished to stand as allies with many Alaska Native persons against oil extraction in their customary lands. Settler-conservationists desiring to be allies may be thinking we have important ethics in common with Alaska Native people yet would do well to learn how to listen for important differences, so as not to reinscribe the racist and colonial fracture by continuing to tend only the environmental one, thus failing to mend each and together. Against the backdrop of U.S. bureaucracy, most, if not all, of the Alaska Native speakers, for example, were expressing their own Peoples’ determinations to defend their ancestral geographies in their own terms; to keep their own long-enacted cultural norms, including sciences; to honor their own ecologies of relations and facilitate their own collective continuances in customary lands, including their own languages, often incommensurable with English-word understandings like “resource,” “conservation,” “refuge,” and/or “wilderness.

“I talk from my heart,” said Neets’aii Gwich’in Elder Dr. Sarah James. This hearing was specifically focused on oil and gas leasing in Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit, the Sacred Place Where Life Begins. This coastal plain – land never ceded to any colonial government – is the Porcupine Caribou Herd calving ground, which Gwich’in themselves know how to keep from disturbing, even by their own presence. Porcupine Caribou, at their calving post, nursing and training ground, “want quiet, clean, private where they can have their calf.” That is what she wanted when she had her child – “for him.” “And that goes for all life,” she said (BLM, 2019a: 6; BLM, 2023: 27–30). The flourishing of Gwich’in and vadzaih (Porcupine Caribou) is integrated spiritually, nutritionally, and culturally, as it has been for millennia, for time immemorial (Gwich’in Steering Commitee, 2020: 4). The U.S. calls this caribou birthing area the 1002 area, which is embedded in its 1980-designated nineteen (plus)-million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. When James spoke at the 2019 Fairbanks hearing, she noted that the government had not mapped “our subsistence use area” correctly. Speaking in English, James explained, she was speaking in her “second language.” Since colonization, she stressed, “We can only be gone so much from the village or Western life in order to make it in two world [sic].” Their children, James explained, are expected to respect their elders, land, and language and then also go out to get their “higher education.” “Our people are living in two world [sic],” she stressed (BLM, 2019a: 29–42).

In the colonialists’ world, the U.S.-designated Refuge contains the second largest area of designated wilderness – some eight million acres. In the words of the 1964 federal Wilderness Act defining it, this is a place wherein “the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”Footnote ¹¹⁸At the northern boundary of the Arctic Refuge, outside this vast wilderness area, is one and a half million acres of coastal plain. The plain is a relatively narrow band, sheltering the caribou calving nursery, between the Brooks Range and the Arctic Ocean. Some industry politicians believe this area will become lucrative, viewing Alaska as a vast “natural resource” warehouse, so vast that such a little drilling can’t hurt, they claim.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Some conservationists are fighting for it to become additional wilderness within the Refuge, a stronger protection against extraction. With obviously crucial differences, nonetheless, in each case, the land is a sort of blank space whose use non-Alaska Native decision-makers – that is, the BLM in an oil v wilderness tug of war – might presume to make. Meanwhile, in 2017, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski bypassed transparent legislative channels and surreptitiously attached a coastal plain drilling mandate, Public Law 115–97, to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which passed. This Public Law 115–97 presented the most urgent threat since 1988, when the Gwich’in Nation united in defense of Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit.Footnote ¹²⁰

In 1988, Gwich’in elders had called for a feast bringing together all their Tribes, separated by U.S. and Canadian government boundaries, for the first time in a century. In James’s words, her Nation was taking “a position as a people of the land as they did before our first visitor came to our area.” Gwich’in have gathered every two years since in defense of the Porcupine Caribou Herd, which – because they are so interwoven – is also a defense of the Gwich’in themselves. The elders guided the Nation to form the Gwich’in Steering Committee [GSC], which is directed with that prime purpose. As James, an original GSC spokesperson, highlighted, it was “like a dream, reunited, like birth of a nation – reunited birth of a nation like we always happen before the border” (BLM, 2019a: 7). And because “oil is huge,” as James often says, the GSC also works to educate white people about Gwich’in connection to the caribou and their inherent right to continue their way of life (BLM, 2019a, 8; Fairbanks Public Hearing, 2023, personal communication; Dunaway, Reference Dunaway2021: 109, see Mishler and Frank, Reference Mishler and Frank2019).

In 2012 and, again, in 2022, the Gwich’in Nation unanimously passed Gwich’in Niintsyaa, their “Resolution to Protect the Birthplace and Nursery Grounds of the Porcupine Caribou Herd.” This was an announcement “in black and white” to the “outside world” – made, again, as James put it, because “we can’t do it by ourself. We can’t because oil is huge” (BLM, 2019a: 8). With a united voice against extractors, the Gwich’in Nation reaffirmed their resolve to defend “the inherent right to continue our way of life” against what is ongoing colonialism. As they note in Gwich’in Niintsyaa, this is a right “recognized and affirmed by Article 1 of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, ratified by the U.S. Senate, and reads in part: “In no case may a People be deprived of their own means of subsistence” (underline mine). This 2022 Gwich’in statement also concluded by resolving “that the 1002 area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge be made Wilderness [italics mine] by the U.S. Government to protect Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit (The Sacred Place Where Life Begins) for generations to come.”Footnote ¹²¹

The document announced all of this for English speakers, and with their Nation’s children so recently punished for speaking their own language. The Anglo-American colonizers also had “renamed” vast areas of Gwich’in, Iñupiat, and other Alaska Native traditional lands enacting linguistic relegation and geographical appropriation within a colonial extraction-protection framework. With generations of forced assimilation and disruption of kinship relations, probably only three hundred persons – most over fifty-five – speak semi-/fluent Dinjii Zhuh ginjìk (Dinjii Zhuh k’yàa), a “severely endangered” language (Mishler and Frank, 2019: 34). Yet, by their communities’ intensive care, resurgent.Footnote ¹²²

Another speaker who testified at the Fairbanks hearing also focused on language and translation – particularly on the incommensurability of meanings with very real, incommensurable consequences. Shawna Larson, a younger woman who is Sugpiaq (Port Graham) on her mother’s side and Ahtna (Chickaloon) on her father’s, first emphasized: “We support the Gwich’in People.” She added, “Those are our relatives. We support the Porcupine Caribou Herd.” “We heard a lot of the elders talking about how there is no way to express certain things in their own traditional language,” Larson continued. “There is no way to say it, really, in English” (BLM, 2019b: 85–87).Footnote ¹²³

Larson then unfolded a story, which I share with her consent, of how her traditional tribal council elders had asked her to help find a better English word than “subsistence” to describe their way of life. Because, Larson explained, the dictionary meaning is “to merely survive.” “We are not merely surviving. We are thriving and we are living. We have a relationship with the land,” she emphasized. So Larson turned to other elders to ask how to say this in English. Trying to convey what she meant, Larson held up one hand to represent “this is the land and the animals” and the other to represent “this is the People.” She clasped her hands together and then asked them, “in our language, how do you say this?” One elder now responded, “Oh, oh, oh, oh. You can’t. There is no one word for that.” He told her,

“We had these also, stories about our relationship with the animals,” Larson concluded her comment, “and it just makes me realize, a Westernized colonial view, world view, cannot be translated into an Indigenous world view. It just can’t” (BLM, 2019b: 85–87).

Vásquez-Fernández and Ahenakew pii tai poo taa (Reference Vásquez-Fernández2020) support the awkwardness of a word like “subsistence” considered in the BLM hearing. “Sustainable” and “development” combined, for example, as they detail, are merely other terms for ongoing paradigms of colonial disrespect and exploitation as usual. Listening to this, listening to Larson, James and so many others as a rejoinder to the domination of Leopoldian and other settler concepts is to keep deepening reflections on how “subsistence,” as well as “conservationist,” “environmentalist,” “wilderness,” and many other English words – words that Anglos so often expect Indigenous speakers to use – might not be translatable into their own ethical and knowledge systems (Dunaway Reference Dunaway2021: 108, 166).Footnote ¹²⁴ Perhaps the same goes for “land use,” “gap,” “human culture,” and (ethical) “bridge.”

In Gwich’in Niintsyaa, the Gwich’in Nation resolved, in English, on protecting their “subsistence,” linked with “human rights,” and used the term “wilderness” in defense of their way of life. Does the term “wilderness” translate into what Gwich’in mean by Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit? (Whyte Reference Whyte2014: 3; Gilio-Whitaker, Reference Gilio-Whitaker2019: 145; Warren, Reference Warren, Anson, Keeler, Lockhart and Lynch2024). And if not, how could it not somehow mean to model different systems of land ethics and practices? Does “ethic” itself have a commensurable Gwich’in meaning, and/or are there multiple conceptions that I might not be able to grasp? Recall how Whyte described the Anishinaabe women elders’ Mother Earth Water Walk – the aspects of interspecies reciprocity and social justice – in contrast with what Leopold modeled as a settler land conservationist. Moreover, as much as I lean in to respect the way Demientieff knows the heart of her People, herself, and Vadzaih as part of each other, how could my relations with that place be anything like hers? How could any inheritance fractured in colonial and environmental terms and transmitted over a matter of single digit generations be commensurate with Indigenous rights and responsibilities lived out over time immemorial? “Indigenous is a birthright word,” Robin Kimmerer writes (Reference Kimmerer2013: 213). Recall what we hear when respected Neets’aii Gwich’in Trimble Gilbert of Vashraii K’ǫǫ (Arctic Village) talks of his Gwich’in worldview describing appropriate relationships pre-existing colonization, that is, as a way of life, self-determining, “long before his homeland was overlain with the Western refuge-wilderness ideology.” For him, the “Refuge,” that is, Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit, is “’the land that holds the bones of thousands of generations of my ancestors.”Footnote ¹²⁵

A third woman, following and followed by many others, has called “Gwich’in” the “language of my soul” (Long, Reference Long2017). Caroline Tritt-Frank, from Vashraii K’ǫǫ, is a language teacher. “I think if they [oil and gas extractors] interfere with the caribou,” she explained, “that will destroy their [the children’s] language, their way of talking because everything that they use on caribou is used in Gwich’in. And so every single piece of the caribou has a Gwich’in name.” And this is what is passed on by elders who “usually speak about hunting.” “So,” she said, “I think the language is a major concern for me and the caribou that the elders live on” (BLM, 2019b: 41–3; Mishler and Frank, Reference Mishler and Frank2019).

As I listened closely to the Alaska Native persons at this BLM hearing – I understood that they would never give up courageously defending something that did not translate into “subsistence.” It did not sound to me like “natural resources” nor defenses of Leopoldian “wilderness,” either, in Ybarra’s words, land that “sits there with its soul hollowed out, emptied of the peoples who help animate the land” (Reference Ybarra and Allen2022: 35).Footnote ¹²⁶ These terms sounded like the currently most apt yet still inadequate conservation “tools” for overturning colonialist domination and liberating “Indigenous conceptions of relationality” (Gilio-Whitaker, Reference Gilio-Whitaker2019: 145).Footnote ¹²⁷ They sounded like “sites of interaction,” in Whyte’s words (2014: 3). What I heard at the hearing sounded to me like the antithesis of Indigenous relegation, appropriation, and assimilation. It seemed to belong to desired abolitionist futures. I heard it sounding more like decolonization, like Land Back, like rematriated sovereignty and Peoples at liberty to make and keep up their own land-ethical relationships, their responsibilities. It sounded like Whyte’s “collective continuance.” Riffing on Schlager’s thesis in reverse, maybe I was hearing a narrative something like: Indigenous sovereignty in sacred Lands without a U.S. federal wilderness designation is better than a wilderness designation, which is better than extraction like oil and gas drilling. Maybe it sounded something like everything – past, present, future – in Peoples’ own tongues. Maybe, attuning with Larson’s testimony, it meant Indigenous Peoples’ own ongoing stories.

5.3 Indigenous Epistemological Privilege: There’s a Story (Not an Allegory)

In “The Land Ethic,” Leopold whited out “Indians” from “The Biotic Pyramid,” which he envisioned as an apt “symbol of land.” “Wilderness,” too, as a norm, placed Black persons, Indigenous persons and sovereign Nations, intersecting with disabled persons and/or those having class-imposed limits outside the land-ethical practices focused on land health. These proposals also demeaned these “others,” placing them – with their languages, systems of knowledge production, and ethics – outside the bounds of a supposedly more supreme human capacity for thinking, ethical agency, and technological innovation. Leopold’s eliminations – all with very real on-the-ground anti-Indigenous consequences – also could discredit Leopold’s common concept of land, as thus based in biased evidence, calling into question ethics and sciences reliant on it.

Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey has ambiguous meanings, as I have mentioned. One of its facets is an essay by Leopold titled “Odyssey.” That essay, like “Song of the Gavilan,” brings alive Leopold’s “land pyramid” from “The Land Ethic,” which is “a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals,” including “man” (Reference Leopold1949: 215). As we have seen, this normative image is faulty as “man” means settlers (and does indeed also privilege men). In his “Odyssey,” Leopold portrays complex ecological dependencies in an efficiently told story about two nutrient atoms. Each atom takes a contrasting ecological trip through the “[prairie] world of living things” before and after the pioneers become wheat farmers there (Reference Leopold1949: 104). These latter clearly need to ascend along the land ethical path. At the same time, as in others of Leopold’s works, there is a generic “Indian.” In this tale, the Indigenous person receives and redistributes nutrient atoms before becoming replaced. Inheriting “the eagle’s plumes,” with them, he “propitiated the Fates.” While the essentials of Leopold’s knowledge in “Odyssey,” if not cause-and-effect itself, apparently do not “occur to him” (106). This person sounds like a spiritual animal, if human, yet not one capable of scientific nor land-ethical thinking.

On the other hand, in “Song of the Gavilan,” “the old Indian” Leopold refers to seems to have been capable of good land relations, but is already a ghost himself, mythic and unthreatening (Leopold, Reference Leopold1949: 149–154). In this narrative, retaining previously noted attitudes, including to Paiute, Apache, and Pueblo Peoples, Leopold takes up the now-vacated role of hunter within his “symbolic structure,” hunter, as if, even now as an adult, Leopold is “playing Indian” (Deloria, Reference Deloria2022, 107). Footnote ¹²⁸ “The structure [of the scene] is symbolic.” “Food is the continuum.” “Food is the continuum” flooded by the energy of “sunshine” in an ecological dreamscape in which he belongs. Meanwhile, Leopold fears that other settlers, with powerful tools but more rudimentary ethics, will arrive with their notions of scientific progress and destroy the community’s healthful functioning (Reference Leopold1949: 153–154). Leopold thus paints himself as a hunter superior both to Indigenous persons and to average settlers by virtue of being driven by more than the hunger of subsistence living, on the one hand, or profit-driven utility, on the other. This sport hunter whom he self-represents, presumably with a fine racial inheritance of wildlife interest, has knowingly exchanged a more certain venison meal for ethical self-limitation. Finally, Leopold evokes Judeo-Christian biblical terms for his rightful homecoming into an existentially alluring scene – “Dust to dust, stone age to stone age, but always the eternal chase!” (Reference Leopold1949: 151).

At the Climate Summit in Gwich’yaa Zhee, for the first time, I witnessed Native experts – including elders and traditional hunters, some additionally trained in dominant, big S science – hosting academic non-Native scientists. The gathering conveyed a powerful alternative to white privilege and Indigenous suppression. Darrell Vent, of Huslia, along the Koyukuk River, told how the Central Arctic caribou herd was split by the Trans-Atlantic Pipeline in the 1970s despite federal agents promising otherwise. This is a story of great concern, too, as more extraction in Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit threatens the Porcupine Herd. “We had to adapt to what they did … but we can’t hunt in our area … they [the Central Herd] moved away,” Vent said. And now hunters must travel 70–120 air miles distant. “And its not as good [fat] as the caribou we used to get,” Vent continued. Our people, he said, had to adapt, have always had to adapt in different ways and have done so from “a long time ago.” Now they have “started hunting more for moose, fish, other species,” Vent continued. At the same time, with layers of challenges adding up fast, “because of global warming we’re seeing that the moose is having a tougher time to survive” (Gwich’in Steering Committee, 2020: 34–35). And as Gwich’in hunter Chuck Peter observed, “There’s these ‘specklebellies’ … White-fronted geese,” also important food, and “… this heat, the sun, it’s driving them up north faster.” “Soon as the river goes, boom they’re gone,” Peter reported. If life depends on food security, food security depends on discerning and adapting to changes in the land community. “We got to risk our lives … cause we gotta fight with the icebergs in the channel breaking up,” Peter explained. Moreover, “Our [Yukon] river is drying up … the water is changing,” King salmon and other fish are suffering followed by fishing restrictions with grave impacts. “I just wanted to mention how important that King Salmon is,” Peter stressed (Gwich’in Steering Committee, 2020: 18). Gwich’in elder Stephen Frost, Sr. told the gathered group, “I’ve seen all the changes … All the permafrost going … I’ll do more listening, but later on maybe I might find my way to talk again” (32).Footnote ¹²⁹

Bernadette Demientieff often has stressed, “My elders are my scientists. They have warned us that this [oil and gas drilling] is not a good idea.”Footnote ¹³⁰ The Vuntut Gwitchin, across the imposed U.S.-Canada border in Old Crow, have issued the first known Indigenous declaration of climate emergency, “Yeendoo Diinehdoo Ji’heezrit Nits’oo Ts’o’ Nan He’aa,” or “After Our Time, How Will the World Be.” This pivotal declaration emphasizes that “Indigenous peoples and local Arctic, coastal and agricultural communities have vast and unique knowledge systems, practices and technologies for mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change as the worlds’ most environmentally conscious inhabitants.” It affirms “the imperative that Indigenous peoples be central to every effort for mitigating and adapting to climate change at local to international scales.”Footnote ¹³¹

At another land protection event, the young Vuntut Chief (of Old Crow, a Gwich’in village on the other side of the current U.S. Canada border), thirty-one-year-old Dana Tizya-Tramm, shared a story “that puts all of this in focus,” he said. This, along with the following, I share with his consent.Footnote ¹³² The elder’s story helps explain how “there’s a lot more to these lands than oil and gas.” “We were driving up the river and going up to [the elder’s] camp,” Tizya-Tramm shared,

In Tizya-Tramm’s story I hear that the moose was really there. The elder was really there. He, himself, was really there. Their ancestors’ bodies were in that ground. And future generations would be born there, coming and going, and passing along the river. “It’s actually all of us in there together,” Tizya-Tramm said.

Then, in another breath, “it’s hard to sit down with some of the staffers or representatives or others in oil and gas industry that look at the pure economic side of things.” “And this,” Tizya-Tramm continued, “is where rationality has an ability to pop in when it’s us versus them,” which he could not see in that way. Seeing land only economically, in terms of oil and gas, “in my view,” Tizya-Tramm stressed, “I actually find a misappropriation of what the term energy truly is.” This is what the elder’s story put into focus, he explained:

To me, at least at first, it sounds like both Leopold’s biotic pyramid and Tizya-Tramm’s tellings mean similar things. Both seem to be imagining intergenerational hunts and flows of nutrients and energy through ecosystems. When I first heard Tizya-Tramm’s stories, I felt myself pulled toward an assumption of common ground between settler and Gwich’in ways and understandings, veering toward what Whyte warns of as a “convergence view.” Yes, I felt a definite pull. I also felt the tug of my old colonizer habit of passing what I heard Tizya-Tramm say through the filter of what I thought I already knew, what Whyte warns of as a “translational view.” That pull was toward expectations for a Gwich’in perspective to be evaluated and legitimized according to my cultural ancestor’s rules. And then, I resisted.

Here are some ways I resist. I remember how Leopold’s writings and my uncritical scholarship were not only extraneous but also offensive to many Alaska Native and other Indigenous, Black, and Chicanx members of my community, and how I felt when I learned that. I recall Harrison’s suggestion that listeners can neither avow nor refuse and reciprocally rejoinder an ancestral proposal if they have either failed to hear it or do not understand the language in which the proposal is made. In the latter case, this may be a sort of refusal to/of the listeners, in the sense that Iñupiat words in Joan Naviyuk Kane’s “Exceeding Beringia” interrupt the expectation of English censoring the poem to non-Iñupiat outsiders (Smith, Reference Smith2021: 168). I hear Larson, echoing her elders: “There is no way to say it, really, in English.” I don’t forget James saying, “oil is huge” and “we can’t do it by ourself.” And also, I hear her say, “We’re huge” – Gwich’in, allied Alaska Native Groups, and more whom Gwich’in have educated since 1988 (BLM, 2019a, 37). I gratefully show up for trainings by Gwich’in about Gwich’in connection to the caribou and salmon and support them in defending their rightful way of life. I ask if this or that word or deed will not ultimately reproduce relationships of colonial domination, as Gilio-Whitaker prompts. I remember McLean suggesting that if there was a history before race/ism, there is one afterwards. I rehearse Rodríguez’s warning against a so-called practical, normalized “common sense” that would obstruct what is necessary to undermine (carceral) totalizing logics. I open to the dreaming of disabled lands and bodies, as Tsaplina suggests. I deepen my hearing of Whyte’s rejoinder to settler-colonialism – that is, “to respect differences and the possibility that non-Indigenous conversants will not immediately understand what all the issues may be, no matter how well they think they grasp the premises of the ethic to which they are trying to compare their own ethic.” I hear Dotson’s prompts – to keep in focus the structural “settler-native-slave triad” that keeps privileging the colonizing system. I recall Ybarra underscoring how Chicana feminists and many others have not needed white conservationists’ teachings when they can keep learning from/with/as “those who embody survival and defiance” and “who have been able to endure for thousands of years.” I keep relearning how to deeply and responsibly listen in something like Robinson’s positionally responsible “panacoustic terms” acknowledging that not everything is for me. I strive to listen not only for avowable commonalities but also for differences – “intercultural equivocality” in Vásquez-Fernández’s and Ahenakew’s words – between my cultural ancestral claims to land ethics, land health, sustainability, and just climate action proposals, and those of Gwich’in and Black people/s, Chicanx, and anyone on the frontlines of structural oppressions. This unsettling and attuning to re-tune is necessary for any chance of genuine and durable coalitions between “people of all heritages,” in Whyte’s terms, so crucial to multiple desired futures. This is merely a beginning. And finally, I feel the warning of Ruìz and Dotson not to mistake a coalition for a home.