Wild At Heart

A century of wilderness, a hike, and Aldo Leopold in a wetsuit.

Ok, I’ll admit it - I’ve never before thought of what Aldo Leopold might have looked like in a wetsuit. It is a strange thought this early in the morning (or at any time really) but I’ve been thinking of “The Professor” (as his students at UW-Madison knew him) so much lately that I half expect him to be sitting on shore waiting for me as I stomp ashore in my own wetsuit to anchor the Little Dipper. Would he be wearing a wetsuit? The thought makes me smile.

(Library of Congress)

Serious-minded, bespectacled, and stern, Aldo Leopold was a brilliant teacher, scientist, forester, conservationist, and author. His seminal book A Sand County Almanac has inspired generations of thinkers, activists, poets, and planners. He was not a man, I would imagine, much prone to splashing around in a wetsuit. But then, that’s not why I’ve been thinking about him anyway. I put the thought out of my mind and try to get serious, like the “Professor.”

Born on January 11, 1887 in Burlington, Iowa, Aldo Leopold had the mind of a scientist and the heart of a poet. A 1909 graduate of the Yale School of Forestry, he was one of the first generation of professional foresters and game managers in the United States. He understood the economics of natural resources that so dominated conservation thinking at the time but could also see something deeper in the mix. "Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient,” he wrote. “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

And he understood the cost of ignoring what could not fit neatly into a ledger sheet - on the land and in the human spirit. “Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question of whether a still higher standard of living is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.”

With this dual-sided perspective then, it may not be so surprising that Leopold while working as a forester for the U.S. Forest Service in 1921 published a piece in the Journal of Forestry not about cutting more timber but about saving a few places where we didn’t cut any.

We set aside national parks for their scenic values. We establish wildlife refuges for their habitat. Why not, Leopold asked in the article he considered his “clarion call,” establish a system where “representative portions of some forests could be preserved as wilderness?” He even had one place in mind as an example. Three years later in 1924, the headwaters of the Gila River in New Mexico became the nation’s (and the world’s) first designated wilderness.

“Of what avail are forty freedoms,” Leopold would write, “without a blank spot on the map?” It has now been a hundred years since Leopold’s Gila Wilderness became the first designated “blank spot” on the map. It would be another forty years (1964) before the Wilderness Act would pass creating the system that Leopold had dreamed of (Leopold himself would not live to see it, dying in 1948 while fighting a wildfire). It would then be another forty years after that before parts of the Apostle Islands would be included in that system but Leopold planted a seed all those years ago that would have a great impact on these islands and I’ve come to this wild island to hike a bit and to think about wilderness.

The Gaylord A. Nelson Wilderness in the Apostles is not the howling, head-spinning, make-you-weak-in-the-knees kind of wilderness found in some western parks or Alaska. There are no sky-high waterfalls or bottomless canyons, no row-upon-row on snow-capped peaks.

Here, the wilderness is found in the small things — the rasp of storm waves on a beach, a skein of shorebirds moving low along the horizon, the slow groan of winter ice, or the sparkle of northern lights. It is embroidered in bear tracks on a trail, in the rumor of wolves, and the ancient music of a bog. Sometimes it is more a feeling than anything you can pinpoint on a map.

Still, on December 8, 2004 that feeling became official when President George W. Bush signed into law a bill passed by Congress designating some 80 percent of the land within the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore (excluding Basswood, Long, and Sand Islands, as well as the mainland units) a part of the National Wilderness Preservation System. That stroke of the presidential pen forever links our park with such famous wild places as Alaska’s Denali National Park, the Boundary Water Canoe Area Wilderness of Minnesota, Michigan’s Isle Royale, and the Gila Wilderness that Leopold helped create in New Mexico.

Unlike some of those places, these islands are not untouched and pristinely wild. They have been touched by the hands of humans — logged, quarried, farmed, and more. But Leopold, who with his family planted some 40,000 pines on his property around their “shack” understood the power of the land to heal if given a chance. The wilderness designation gives the islands that chance.

Created to “secure for this and future generations an enduring resource of wilderness,” the designation insures that never again will the Apostle Islands be commercially logged or farmed. There will be no roads, no motorized recreation on the islands, no mining, no development. This place, the law says, will stay forever wild.

We need wild places - from Denali to the Apostle Islands - if only for the way they remind us again and again of the immensity of the world we live in and the humbleness of our place in it. Aldo Leopold knew that more than most and his life’s work secured these wild places for the rest of us.

As I circle back to where the Little Dipper is still waiting at anchor, I smile at my earlier thought of Leopold waiting for me in a wetsuit. He isn’t there of course but Leopold’s touch - through his teaching, advocacy, and his writing — is on every wild place left in our country. That includes the Apostle Islands and its Gaylord Nelson Wilderness.

“I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in,” he once said about wild places. “Me too,” I think to myself as I pull anchor and back away from shore. “Me too.”

— Jeff Rennicke

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To read my essay about the “rewilding” of the Apostle Islands, how they went from “trashed to treasured” check out the link below.