• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

And oil was starting to be discovered all over Alaska—good news for the territory. Between 1902 and 1933 twenty-seven new oil wells were dug. Eight of these failed to reach oil-bearing rock, and eleven were “no shows” (the term used at the time), but eighteen—all in the Katalla Slough claim—did produce oil. According to Alaska Business Monthly, the depth of the wells ranged from 366 feet to 1,810 feet. It was understood by conservationists that once Alaska became a desirable oil field, saving vast tracts of wilderness through congressional action or even by executive orders would be a far more difficult proposition.32

III

Aldo Leopold took the deaths of Roosevelt, Muir, and Burroughs just as hard as Merriam, Nelson, Hornaday, and Sheldon did. All three had, to one degree or another, been Leopold’s inspirations. No longer would Leopold defer to anyone in his own area of expertise—he himself was the new front line. Quitting the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce, he rejoined the U.S. Forest Service to help protect more than 20 million acres of the Southwest. Leopold’s partially formed vision of roadless wilderness lands inside national forests started to take firmer shape. In 1922, he submitted a formal proposal to the chief of the U.S. Forest Service, William B. Greeley, to have the Gila National Forest of New Mexico administered as a wilderness area; it was approved on June 3, 1924. That same year Leopold, a father of four, moved to Madison, Wisconsin, and started working for the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory as an assistant (later associate) director. Daily, Leopold grew perturbed that in the 1920s, the idea that bigger was better held sway. What worried Leopold was the fortune seekers’ insistence that having steam shovels create ditches to drain marshes dry or giant circular bandsaws to cut up sequoias was somehow a technological advancement for modern America. In a series of letters and articles, he described big companies as being blind to the ecological destruction they often wrought.33

Leopold felt that the market hunting in Alaska was reminiscent—morally—of what had happened to the Great Plains buffalo in the nineteenth century. Without proper game laws, Alaskan caribou and Dall sheep would vanish. His revulsion at such slaughter of wildlife deepened. Wildlife resources, he insisted, should be handed down to future generations undiminished. “It appears to be a fact that even in the remotest region of Alaska indiscriminate slaughter is spelling the doom of the game supply,” he said, at around the time of Roosevelt’s death. “No wilderness seems vast enough to protect wildlife, no countryside thickly populated enough to exclude it.”34 The U.S. Biological Survey urged Alaskan fur wardens to arrest and prosecute poachers, whose carnage amounted to criminality. “No people,” Ernest Walker warned Alaskans in 1921, “should forget that it is their duty to pass into posterity all that can be saved of our wildlife, for future generations likewise have a claim to it.”35

Following the lead of Roosevelt—who had created fifty-one federal bird reservations—Leopold started calling for new wildlife refuges to protect threatened species such as the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis). “It is known that the Ivory-bill requires as its habitat large stretches of virgin hardwood,” Leopold wrote in an article in American Forests. “The present remnant lives in such a forest, owned and held by an industry as reserve stumpage. Cutting may begin, and the Ivory-bill may be done for at any moment. The Park Service has or can get funds to buy virgin forests, but it does not know of the Ivory-bill or its predicament. It is absorbed in the intricate problem of accommodating the public which is mobbing its parks. . . . Is it not time to establish particularly parks (or their equivalent) for particular ‘natural wonders’ like the Ivory-bill?”36*

While Leopold—like Sheldon—continued hunting, he had become an activist like Hornaday with regard to species protection. But, haunted after shooting a wolf in New Mexico