The commercial types have opened another superstore up the road a piece. A couple of miles south, the rattle of hammers announces the raising of roofs for a new subdivision. At the end of our block, road scrapers prepare to double the lanes at the intersection, a dirty process that covers my house and trees with a thick patina of gritty brown dust.

Progress, so they say, is everywhere. That new intersection accelerates the process of urbanizing our little village neighborhood. The new subdivision occupies a hollow where a tiny rivulet used to run; they installed a big drainage pipe to take care of that. And the superstore, that's another hundred acres or so buried under tons of concrete — the finest soil in the world, sentenced to mercantile sterility. As if we need more shopping venues. As if the field mice, the foxes, the hawks, the owls need fewer homes. As if we need less peace and quiet.

For reasons personal and madden-ing, I have suffered a fair number of occasions to travel in central Illinois recently, eastward toward Champaign, southward as well. Everywhere the story is the same: commerce imposing ever more gaudy emporia on rural neighborhoods, surrounding them with upscale homes on tiny lots. Streams are disappearing, odd groves of ancient trees are becoming piles of smolder-ing slash, windbreaks painfully planted during dustbowl days are being plowed under. Make way. Illinois is spreading out. In the meantime, marsh hawks, bobcats, even bobwhite quail are on the way to becoming mythological creatures. I have not seen a fox in my part of town in 10 years. Once, Reynard was a common fellow in my neigh-borhood, and he is supposed to be adept at dealing with urban sprawl.

How I wish I could tell myself this is just a bad dream, an aberration, a product of the moment. That's the

Courtesy of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources

Courtesy of Lincoln Memorial Garden and Nature Center

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Courtesy of Dennis Oehmke
Bobwhite

Courtesy of Dennis Oehmke
Male and female bobwhites

Courtesy of Dennis Oehmke
Carolina wren

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Courtesy of Dennis Oehmke
Scarlet tanager

Courtesy of the Illinois Department of Transportation
Rock River and prairie restoration, Castle Rock State Park

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After five centuries of tampering, we have no choice but to continue, generally with conflicting goals and little comprehension of nature's own ways.

This sobering dilemma has come home in a rather odd way over the past couple of weeks. I've been reading For the Health of the Land, a new collection of "lost" works written by the great conservationist Aldo Leopold (1886-1948). Leopold was a pioneer in wildlife manage-ment, working for the U.S. Forest Service before going on to an academic career at the University of Wisconsin. His most famous work, A Sand County Almanac,a collection of essays first published in 1949, is regarded as a fundamental volume in the library of the environ-mental movement. This new selection of essays, rescued from obscurity and assembled by J. Baird Callicott of the University of Wisconsin and Eric Freyfogle of the University of Illinois, is a record of Leopold's formative years, when he struggled to achieve an ecological vision. Reading the volume, I am intrigued by the awkward, at times dubious, nature of his journey. The roots of environ-mentalism are many, varied, and not always pretty.

Aldo Leopold spent the early portions of his career doing consid-erable harm to the thing he loved. He is quite honest about this in A Sand County Almanac, confessing to an unremitting determination to eliminate such predators as wolves to promote the population of deer. By the last year of his life, Leopold was prepared to admit the flaws in this pursuit. For the deer to flourish, he concluded, an entire ecosystem has to be protected, and that includes the wolves, coyotes and mountain lions. But that was in 1948. What this new collection makes transparently clear is how much Leopold's initial devotion to the natural world was grounded in his fervent desire to hunt game animals.

This is not especially surprising. The early history of nature enthusi-asm in our culture is peppered with such images. English naturalist Gilbert White, author of what many regard as the first comprehensive modern natural history, regularly shot specimens for inspection. John James Audubon, our most celebrated nature artist, captured those vivid colors and arresting features by the simple expedient of shooting several examples of each species and nailing them to perches as models. But our greatest ecological voice, Henry David Thoreau, came to his most profound appreciation of nature after giving up his gun. And his intellectual descendant, John Muir, lectured Theodore Roosevelt on the "childish habit" of hunting. Yet, while the nature lover with gun in hand is a paradoxical image, it has been a commanding one.

Several of Leopold's earliest essays make plain that his wildlife management initiatives are intended to promote game production. Despairing of the destructive, ground-clearing habits of Wisconsin farmers, Leopold chronicles his efforts to encourage cooperation between farmers and hunters. Leaving bottomland in cover, selectively cutting woodlands, leaving brush: These measures are not intended to protect or assist wild nature, but to produce large coveys of quail. Any benefit to the larger ecological community is, at this stage of Leopold's career, absolutely incidental. Hunting is the "highest use" of any wild land.

Standing at the brink of the 21st century, this seems an anomalous heritage. That hunters need nature, that they prefer woods to subdivi-sions and superstores, I have no doubt. And hunting does serve important functions. Along with fishing, it represents a vestige of the ancient, sacred concept of the public commons, where all share equally in the means of living. Where I grew up, for example, a poor family's success in deer season meant the difference between a bounteous Thanksgiving and a helping of beans. And many wealthier hunters contributed their prey to orphanages.

Courtesy of the Illinois Department of Transportation

The destruction of the wilds is often a product of those who love the natural world. That we destroy for profit is readily understandable. That we destroy out of love is harder to swallow.

It is also true that after four centuries of "wildlife management" that meant the destruction of cougars, timber wolves, grizzlies and other beasts with sharp teeth,

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Hunting can and does nurture an appreciation for the wilds, too. Peter Fitzgerald, Illinois’s new and maverick Republican senator, attrib-utes his surprisingly “green” voting record in Congress to a regard for nature instilled during childhood hunting expeditions with his family. Throughout the 20th century, “sport” hunters have pushed for legislation protecting birds and animals, preserving wilderness. No animals, no sport: That much is obvious.

Courtesy of Dennis Oehmke
Red-bellied woodpecker

Whether hunting is the “highest use” of wilderness, I have sincere doubts. Leopold’s essays do nothing to assuage them. In an essay written in 1938, he quotes with evident approval the sentiments of Edward, Duke of York, from the 15th century. Edward was one of those sporting guys; to him, nothing was more wholesome than hunting with his buddies. The idea of staying home with his wife and family was an invitation to the seven deadly sins. Far better to get up early in the morning, join his pals and go shoot something. Not for the food, mind. Edward clearly knew where his next meal was coming from. For Edward — and for Aldo Leopold — the essence of hunting is the growth of proper virtue. But that virtue derives from killing living things. Small wonder we say nothing when another fox den is buried beneath the asphalt.

As much as I respect Aldo Leopold’s intellectual gifts to envi-ronmentalism, I have to go with Henry Thoreau. Even before moving to Walden Pond in 1845, he had given up the youthful practice of shooting. What good is a spectacular hawk, a crafty owl, dead in the hand? Better to watch the squirrel frisking among the corn cobs outside the cabin, play tag with a living, laughing loon on Walden Pond. There’s the same outdoor experience, but so much more is learned. Eventually, as in Thoreau’s case, there might even come a recognition that nature operates as a completed whole.

Aldo Leopold did arrive at something resembling a holistic point of view, but his attitude shifted slowly, and never changed altogether. The heart of the essays collected in For the Health of the Land is a series of short pieces published as “A Landowner’s Conservation Almanac.” These essays, written between 1938 and 1942, were mostly published in the Wisconsin Agriculturalist and Farmer, a popular farm newspaper. Devotees will recognize in the pieces, arranged sequentially according to season, the prototype for much of A Sand County Almanac. Here, in the guise of advice to farmers, are the poetic observations of nature at work, the plea for a deeper understanding and respect for nature’s subtle ways. Each is written as one enthusiast to another. Leopold was a scientist, but in these essays he made clear his connection to farming folk: the love of the land, the curiosity about animals, the desire to hunt. The Almanac was to establish common ground between those who used the land and the scientist who would advise and direct them.

As expressed in this collection, Leopold’s chief concern during the Depression era was to address and enhance the values of private landowners, especially the farmers. From his own experiences, he understood both the powers and limitations of federal conservation efforts. While the national govern-ment could and did manage millions of acres of wilderness, the fact remained that 99 percent of America’s lands remained in private hands. If wild nature were to survive, if there were to be game to hunt, resource managers were going to have to speak the language of the actual landowners.

Certainly Aldo Leopold grew intellectually in the years after writing most of these essays. The defense of nature expressed in A Sand County Almanac rests on an ethical concept: Nature has rights that no human being may deny. People are citizens of the landscape, as are the flowers, the pheasants and the foxes. Our rights do not extend to the denial of the rights of other species. Studying For the Health of the Land, the reader comes to understand that this land ethic originated in a desire to create a democratic community of responsi-ble landholders, a community where men and women would work to protect and support nature because it is the moral thing to do. Whatever the foundations of the love of nature might be, that love holds the key to nature’s survival.

Half a century later, I put down these essays to listen to the deter-mined grind of a road grader, the persistent tapping of hammers. Aldo Leopold’s utopian world of democratic, moral, nature-loving farmers seems like a dream. It is a dream. The ruthless, ongoing destruction of habitat in the name of unheeding consumerism is the reality. What values do these developers have, that we might appeal to them to spare a hawk’s nest or a fox’s den? 

Robert Kuhn McGregor, an environmental historian at the University of Illinois at Springfield, is a regular contributor to the magazine.

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