On this, the hundredth anniversary of Aldo Leopold's birth, it is appropriate to reexamine some of the ideas entrusted to us by this great conservationist and to reiterate those that have relevance today. This essay is a search for the role of fish and wildlife management in an interpretation of that trust.
Widely recognized as the "founder of game management" in North America, Leopold's views have become a dominant force guiding the professional corps of managers in their endeavors to sustain, protect and enhance our publicly-owned fish and wildlife resources. Bringing to bear the fruits of science and technology, professional biologists have been manipulating the habitats of wild creatures, restoring nearly forgotten species to semblances of their former ranges, enhancing some populations at the expense of others, indeed, altering even the genetic codes by which the survivors of each generation transmit to the next their own formula for survival. It is now clear that the knowledge exists to enhance populations of highly esteemed species of fish and game, however, the time has come to make more explicit the qualities that we associate with conservation in order to guide our selection of management objectives.
We begin with Leopold's protagonism for creation of a Land Ethic, an idea that would guide development of human civilization in harmony with other inhabitants of the biosphere. It was not Leopold's intent to be heard only by the wildlife manager or professional biologist. He spoke lucidly to millions of outdoors enthusiasts of the human need for contact with wild things as an essential component of our humanity and a measure of our entitlement to designation as a civilized society. Through the pages of A Sand County Almanac* he sketched the natural history of central Wisconsin and challenged the foolhardy to envision a life without "things wild and free." Such was Aldo Leopold's plea, a sermon to the converted, imploring them to go forth espousing a "Land Ethic" which, if adopted, would have us "...see land as a community to which we belong, [and which] we may begin to use ... with love and respect."
Leopold's legacy to fish and wildlife managers was to place squarely upon our shoulders the responsibility for judging ecologically what must be done to keep our world fit for humans. But ecological judgement is more than a simple choice among alternative species. Just as its legal analogue is imbedded in a matrix of tradition, knowledge, experience and expectation, ecological judgement requires a distinction between right and wrong, a philosophical foundation to guide the choosing, put simply, an ethic . A keen observer of nature (human and otherwise), Leopold further noted that "All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts."
Nearly half a century has elapsed since Leopold's passing and in that time renewable resource management has flourished in North America. Outstanding achievements such as the revitalization of Lake Erie and reestablishment of wild turkey attest to our ability to correct environmental degradation and restore valued species to significant levels of abundance. But other activities increasingly compete for the attention of conservation agencies: the promotion and enhancement of artificially supported populations of fish and game that would not otherwise exist in numbers sufficient to sustain exploitation, and the incessant quest for exotic species perceived as the solution to broader environmental problems. It is appropriate to question whether or not these activities are consonant with the land ethic or, indeed, in conflict with a conservation mandate.
Two issues in the upper midwest clarify the problem with respect to fisheries management. In an effort to restore fishing opportunities, a proposal has been made to transplant the European pikeperch, or zander, to public waters in North Dakota. This fish, closely related to walleye and yellow perch, is expected to utilize degraded environments presently unsuitable for the native walleye. On the basis of nearly a century of experience with ecological catastrophes precipitated by the accidental and deliberate introduction of exotic fish in North America (for example, sea lamprey and the Asian carp), the North Dakota proposal has been roundly criticized by resource management agencies in neighboring states and by ecologically aware fisheries biologists speaking independently through their professional organization, the American Fisheries Society. The point here is not to debate the relative merits of one species or another, or to detail a litany of estimable and inestimable risks, but simply to note that such schemes are an inescapable product of the "development" mentality that markets recreation. But Leopold proclaimed that promoting perception of evolution and ecology "is the only truly creative part of [outdoor] recreational engineering." How then does the North Dakota experiment hope to enhance this perception in the fishing public? Are there alternative measures that might restore the habitat so that it would again be suitable for the native species? If it could be done for Lake Erie, why not for North Dakota?
Another issue of this kind arises with the salmon fisheries of the Great Lakes. Introduced in the late 1960's to control alewives (a species of the shad family that invaded the upper lakes through the Welland Canal), both coho and chinook salmon have grown so popular with the fishing public that it is doubtful the conservation agencies could withdraw from a salmon planting program in the U. S. waters of the lakes even if they wanted to. A common practice among ecological tinkerers, combating one exotic species with another, has initiated an endless cycle of biological and economic dependency that stretches beyond the control of the conservation agency that created it. Perpetuation of this artificial fishery in the Great Lakes depends not only upon low cost hatchery production, a by-product of oil-dependent North American agriculture, but also upon continuous replenishment of the inland stocks with salmon of Pacific origin. For reasons not yet known to ecologists, reproductive viability of the imported salmon seems to decline successively with each generation that is reared strictly within the confines of the Great Lakes. And what naivete suggests that these exotic salmon and their prey could ever achieve a balance in their abundance?
Leopold recognized "all intergrades of artificiality" in the recreational fisheries, noting that hatchery-reared trout were an imperfect substitute for wild fish. He postulated an inverse relationship between this artificiality and an aesthetic scale of trophy values. I doubt that the throbbing rhythm of a sounding chinook hooked over Milwaukee Reef would have seduced him into accepting salmon as a perpetual replacement for the native lake trout. In spite of their artificiality, the salmon fisheries have been sufficiently prosperous to revitalize the economies of the small lakeshore communities whose resource base of food fish fisheries had collapsed from the combined effects of accident (the sea lamprey invasion) and abuse (nearly a century of over-intensive fishing). The result has been that the economic manifestation of recreation, rather than its ethical aspect, is subverting the resource agency's mandate to manage for a conservation objective. Fisheries management budgets are being tied to license revenues in a self-defeating spiral of diminishing aesthetic returns and escalating uncertainty about the sustainability of the salmon-alewife teeter-totter. In a twist of dramatic irony, we find Alaskan north slope oil providing an energy subsidy for the culture of species that grow very well in Alaska but cannot support themselves in the Great Lakes, and litigation is underway to redress powerplant destruction of salmon fodder, the once-scorned alewife whose multitudes rotted on Lake Michigan's beaches a score of years ago.
I suspect that if Aldo Leopold could witness the tragedy that he so clearly foretold, he would not dally with an assessment of how accurate he had been (an occupational hazard among ecologists who frequently sacrifice precision for accuracy) but would encourage us to reaffirm our insistence upon a land ethic that could temper our utilization and enhance our appreciation of our fish and wildlife heritage. Just as childless couples shoulder an educational tax burden in exchange for the privilege of living in an educated society, we must all share the costs of ecologically sound renewable resource management in exchange for the promise of perpetuating the biosphere.
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Date created: November 28, 1995 Last modified: November 28, 1995 Copyright © 1995, George R. Spangler Maintained by: G. Spangler GRS@finsandfur.fw.umn.edu