For their last meeting of the semester, N.C . State’s Leopold Wildlife Club held a documentary screening and discussion of Green Fire, the biographical story of their namesake Aldo Leopold.
Leopold has strongly influenced the modern environmental movement. He developed the first comprehensive management plan for the Grand Canyon and proposed the Gila Wilderness Area, the first national wilderness area in the Forest Service system. He also helped found the Wilderness Society. The film is named after a quote from Leopold’s book.
“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized 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,” Leopold said in A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949 after his death.
The film was made through a partnership between the Aldo Leopold Foundation, the Center for Humans and Nature and the U.S . Forest Service. It aims to highlight his idea of land ethic for the ecological challenges of today.
Leopold defines land ethic as the conservation of nature through the harmony of men and land.
The Wildlife Club hoped to fuel discussion on Leopold’s influence in the field and his ideas on conservation.
“I had to read the Sand County Almanac for two different classes, and it was, it would be too cliche to say it was life-changing, but it definitely affected my view on things. It got me thinking about a lot of the ideas of conservation,” Charles Sanders, senior in fisheries and wildlife sciences and president elect of the Wildlife Club, said.
Sanders said he believes in the distinction between environmentalism and conservation that he believes Leopold upholds in his writing.
“Environmentalism has become more of a political agenda than anything else, and conservation is not anti-use … You can use so much, but you can’t use it all, or you’ll end up with nothing,” Sanders said. “You have a difference between the extreme, let’s go and protect everything, people be damned, and the recognition [that] we need wood, we need this, we need that, so let’s use it, but let’s use it sustainably, and I think that’s the key is that term.”
In the documentary, Theodore Roosevelt was mentioned as being part of the beginning of this movement towards sustainability.
“Optimism is a good characteristic, but if carried to an excess, it becomes foolishness. We are prone to speak of the resources of this country as inexhaustible; this is not so,” Theodore Roosevelt said in his seventh annual message to congress in 1907.
Sanders believes that Leopold played a key role in bring the ideas of Roosevelt and others together into something that can still be used today by those studying wildlife conversation.
“They kind of laid the foundations. I think Leopold took a lot of what they started. He took the pieces and put them together. He was a key component in getting the ethic going. He took [their ideas] one step further and really got us thinking about the community and not just pieces of it,” Sanders said.
The N.C . State Wildlife Club is open to anyone who wishes to join and will continue to meet every month come fall semester this year. Students can expect to see guest speakers within the wildlife profession and are able to attend field days giving wildlife students hands-on work experience.