Dylan Lorio-MacNamara - Aldo Leopold, "Thinking Like a Mountain", thoughts

Aldo Leopold was one of the founding figures in the field of ecology and forest management, and his landmark work, A Sand County Almanac, provides insight into the transformative ways of thinking which led to his success. This book essentially establishes that naturalism is an inherently phenomenological enterprise; it requires both intense mindfulness and first-hand, close descriptive perception of the natural world. "Our ability to perceive in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language." Here Leopold describes the essence of a positive aesthetics, wherein all of nature will be seen as beautiful once we learn about its ecological importance. This phenomenological exercise is most put into practice in the essay "Thinking Like a Mountain,"which finds Leopold musing about the meaning of a wolf's howl. He describes the dangers of over hunting/extirpating wolf populations, but in a fashion rooted in phenomenology. Leopold describes the process of how removing a wolf population wreaks havoc on the mountain ecosystem, in terms of the myriad micro-impacts which ultimately result in total destruction. Leopold is trying to condemn human appropriations of natural processes, such as wolf hunting, by showing that when we are committed to a phenomenological understanding of our place in the world, we recognize the true consequences of our actions.

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