Aldo Leopold's The Land Ethic And Thinking Like A Mountain

Aldo Leopold a Forestry Professor from The University of Wisconsin, who also at a young age worked as a forester for the US Forest Service, wrote some interesting articles on his views and experiences he had in the field of forestry. Two articles which I have had the pleasure of reading are “The Land Ethic” and “Thinking like a mountain”. In his article “the Land Ethic” he introduces a number of alternative ways to be more conscious about the way we use the land and less abusive to the land, ideas that we are just now starting to explore like hydroponics and species conservation. Aldo Leopold’s article “Thinking like a mountain” is an article written about a particular experience he had as young forester working for the US Forest Service, this …show more content…
Aldo wrote an article called Thinking Like a Mountain that tells the story of how he and his coworker would in his words “In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy” (1). More and more occurrences like this put the wolves into a state of extinction in the United States, merely because they were thought of as only predators infringing on the country’s economy, for example the cattle ranchers might have one less cow. We never knew what devastation would follow, Aldo explains the devastation of not having the wolves, “I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anemic desuetude, and then death” (2). Since there were no wolves the deer population spiked, causing the deer to eat everything to the point the woods looked like it had a gardener pruning everything to about five feet …show more content…
Now as a result we are locking into hydroelectric power, turbine power and even harvesting the power of the ocean to create energy to power our homes. Then we look at the automotive industry here in California we have one of the newest car companies building an all-electric sports car called Tesla. We all know the one thing as Americans we have been using for years, that is now almost second nature, is recycling. By recycling we can use the same products over and over again. For example, say we trough a cardboard box into the recycling plant we could be using that as our next to-go box at a restaurant, or if we recycle our milk jugs it can be reproduced into our next milk jug or something else we use, this allows us to use less of mother nature and use what we have already have harvested from her. The coolest example I see every day when I’m at school, this was not even thought of ten years ago. The practice is the use of reusable water bottles. Every day I see approximately 10 of these bottles in each class. This practice help reduce the use plastic bottles, this action is being embarrassed by so many establishments that they are installing water bottle filling stations like the one in the Collage of the Redwoods