Center for Humans & Nature:
“As large systems change slowly, they become sort of the background for what we do. Smaller systems—like our yard, for example—change much more rapidly. I noticed that Leopold had this very sophisticated conception of time and space, even though he introduced it metaphorically. And then I read “Thinking Like a Mountain,” in which Leopold described how he had destroyed the wolf populations [in the American Southwest] and how he later came to regret that after the deer population he was trying to increase started to actually decrease from overpopulation and over-browsing of the mountainside. Leopold wrote about the famous incident where, having killed an old wolf, he watched the green fire die in her eyes. What he learned there, I think, was that wolves function in a larger and slower system than humans do.
Consequently, we can come to hate something like the wolf, even though, once you start to see the wolf’s role in longer-term developments, the wolf becomes almost like a savior, right? Having destroyed the wolves and changed the ecological system, he then regretted it. He fell back on that hierarchical framework to say, “I was thinking only like a human. I was only thinking in terms of increasing the deer herd for hunters. But then I realized that my activities on that level spilled over to affect the usually slower-scale changes.” In fact, he saw the impacts on the ecological scale, the scale at which deer and wolves interact. The deer populations growing out of control were a result of his removing the wolves. So his human thinking destroyed a very complex system.
So what’s interesting about that is that Leopold starts to see the world on three different levels: the human, the ecological, and the evolutionary. And he felt that we can see positive values on each of those three levels. The positive level for humans is generally economic and developmental. The level of interactions among species (wolves and deer, in particular) would be the ecological scale. And what he realized was that, however important our economics are, if we destroy the ecological system, it’s going to come back and bite us even at the human level. So his explanation of why he went wrong was very much based in a scientific model, which he showed through the metaphor of “thinking like a mountain.””
Interesting perspective that we need to broaden our timelines to create pragmatic environmental solutions.
