No nature without fear

Aldo Leopold saw this in the eyes of a dying wolf: when we no longer fear nature, we are on the road to its destruction

by Shawn Simpson  BIO

Aldo Leopold sitting on rim rock above the Rio Gavilan in northern Mexico, while on a bow hunting trip in 1938. Photo courtesy the Aldo Leopold Foundation

is a postdoctoral research fellow in environmental philosophy at North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa. He is the author of Art as Communication: Aesthetics, Evolution, and Signaling (2024).

Edited byCameron Allan McKean

In the early 1900s, in a remote mountain forest on the central border of New Mexico and Arizona, a patrol of wilderness rangers sitting high on a shelf of rim rock noticed what appeared to be a deer fording the river below. But as the animal emerged from the water onto the riverbank, they saw that it was a mother wolf, soon joyfully greeted by a pack of her grown pups. In those days, it was United States federal policy to eradicate predators, and forest rangers would shoot and kill the ones they encountered on sight. Dutiful to their task, the men aimed their rifles and fired into the canines until there were no bullets left.

Down by the river, the rangers reached the mother wolf just in time to see what one of them, a young man named Aldo Leopold, would later describe as a ‘fierce green fire dying in her eyes’. In that moment, Leopold writes, he realised that what they had done was deeply wrong. They had not yet learned how to ‘think like a mountain’.

In the dying eyes of a wolf, Leopold caught a glimpse of something that changed the course of his thinking about nature. He would spend the rest of his life making sense of that glimpse, and hoping to share the lessons from that day on the riverbank. But much of what he learned remains misunderstood.

Can we, Leopold asked, accept that Earth does not exist for our comfort? Can we accept a world that depends on predators and other forces we cannot control? Can we accept our fear? For Leopold, these questions pointed in the same direction: can we learn to think like a mountain?

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Leopold was born in 1887 in Burlington, Iowa, to parents of German ancestry. His father, Carl, owned a desk-making business. His mother, Clara, managed the family home. Carl frequently took his young son hiking and hunting, instilling in him a deep love of nature. So great was Leopold’s interest in the natural world that, in 1907, he enrolled in the nation’s first school of forestry, which had been established at Yale University seven years earlier.

Aldo Leopold, aged six, in 1893. Courtesy the Aldo Leopold Archives, University of Wisconsin-Madison

After graduating, Leopold chose a life spent largely outdoors. His first professional role was with the US Forest Service, where he served as a wilderness ranger assigned to forests in New Mexico and the then-scarcely populated Arizona Territory. His responsibilities included patrolling by horseback, as well as interacting with hunters, ranchers and other visitors. He also dealt with emergencies, such as wildfires, rescues and poaching. In many ways, he became a jack-of-all-trades and an expert of the land – as any good ranger must.

Apache National Forest Officers in 1909; Leopold is number 11. Photo courtesy the Arizona Memory Project

Writing about his experiences, Leopold also became a kind of environmental philosopher. Trained in forestry and employed in the field for much of his life, he thought deeply about the animals, plants, soils and waters he encountered in his work, and the relationships that bound them together. He came to care deeply about these things, and that care motivated him to protect them. For him, conservation was a moral commitment.

A proper relationship with the environment depends on learning to see the world and our place in it entirely differently

Leopold was not an academic philosopher in any traditional sense. He eventually became professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin, Madison – the first post of its kind – but most of his publications and research output from that period were of a technical nature or in the form of field reports and almanac entries. His posthumously published book A Sand County Almanac (1949) is different. The first part of the book primarily consists of Leopold’s observations of ecological change on his farm in Sand County, Wisconsin, but later sections include essays that articulate a mature environmental philosophy emerging from his days as a ranger. The story of the ‘fierce green fire’ is shared in one of these essays. In the final part of the book, Leopold outlined what was, in the context of the US around the mid-20th century, a radically different way of understanding and thinking about our relationship with nature. He writes:

It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense.

In the decades since Sand County’s publication, Leopold’s injunction to ‘think like a mountain’ has been widely interpreted and debated across environmental philosophy and related disciplines. Some scholars have approached this notion as a form of systems thinking, foregrounding long temporal horizons, ecological interdependence, and the limits of human management. Others interpret it as an early articulation of a more-than-human ethics, aligning Leopold’s thought with later work on multispecies relations and nonhuman value. In an article for the academic journal Critical Perspectives on Accounting in 1996, Frank Birkin describes Leopold’s call as a challenge to dominant economic rationalities, specifically those instrumental, anthropocentric and reductionist ways of valuing land that treat ecological systems primarily as economic resources. Meanwhile, the anthropologist Anand Pandian in 2014 places Leopold in conversation with contemporary anthropological work such as Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013), drawing attention to shared concerns with how environments register and respond to human interventions. Across these interpretations, we find a common thread: a proper relationship with the environment depends on learning to see the world and our place in it entirely differently. This is a call Leopold heard when he looked into the eyes of the dying mother wolf: ‘I realised then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain.’

But somewhat forgotten in the interpretations and debates his ideas have generated is a point that is uncomfortable and easily overlooked. Thinking like a mountain, for Leopold, is about learning to live in fear.

A Sand County Almanac (1949). Courtesy Peter Harrington Rare Books

Like Leopold, I was inspired by the outdoors when I was a young man, and spent time hiking and camping with my family throughout Arizona. In high school, I was fortunate to be assigned Leopold’s Sand County by my biology teacher, a man who regularly volunteered with the US Forest Service conducting surveys of Arizona’s bears. After finishing my master’s degree in philosophy in New York City, I decided to take a break from academia and joined the Forest Service myself.

Philosophy felt like a funny background for a young ranger. Most of my new colleagues had studied biology or ecology and spent more time sleeping on the ground than on a mattress. But it turned out that almost all of them loved, and were well versed in, the work of certain philosophers, especially John Muir, Edward Abbey and, yes, Aldo Leopold. One lead ranger even made a habit of reciting a different passage from Muir at the end of each workday.

During my time in the field, I kept a copy of Sand County on me. On patrol in the mountains, little things – a flower, a sunset, even a mosquito – would spark memories of Leopold’s words. In the early........

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