Caribou Gear Tarp

READ THIS!

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Thought I'd throw some more fuel on the recent ATV debates. This was published in the 1940's!!!


Wildlife in American Culture
by Aldo Leopold
The culture of primitive peoples is often based on wildlife. Thus, the plains Indian not only ate buffalo, but buffalo largely determined his architecture, dress, language, arts, and religion.

In civilized peoples, the economic base shifts to tame animals and plants, but the culture nevertheless retains part of its wild roots. This paper deals with the value of this wild rootage.

No one can weigh or measure culture, hence I will waste no time trying to do so. Suffice it to say that by common consent of thinking people, there are cultural values in the sports, customs, and experiences, which renew contacts with wild things. I venture the opinion that these values are of three kinds.

First, there is value in any experience, which reminds us of our distinctive national origins and evolution, i.e., which stimulates awareness of American history. Such awareness is "nationalism" in its best sense. For lack of any other short name, I will call this the "split-rail value." For example: a boy scout has tanned a coonskin cap, and goes Daniel-Booneing in the willow thicket below the tracks. He is re-enacting American history. He is, to that extent, culturally prepared to lace the dark and bloody realities of 1943. Again: a farmer boy arrives in the schoolroom reeking of muskrat; he has tended his traps before breakfast. He is re-enacting the romance of the fur trade. Ontogeny repeats phylogeny in society as well as in the individual.

Second, there is value in which reminds us of our dependency on the soil-plant-animal-man food chain. Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relation with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry. Time was when education moved toward soil, nor away from it. The nursery jingle about bringing home a rabbit skin to wrap the baby bunting in is one of many reminders in folklore that man once hunted to feed and clothe his family.

Third, the conquest of nature by machines has led to much unnecessary destruction of resources. Our tools improve faster than we do. It is unlikely that economic motives alone will ever teach us to use our new tools gently. The only remedy is to extend our system of ethics from the man-man relation to the man-earth relation (1). We shall achieve conservation when and only when the destructive use of land becomes unethical--punishable by social ostracism. Any experience that stimulates this extension of ethics is culturally valuable. Any that has the opposite effect is culturally damaging. For example, we have many bad hunters with good guns. Such a hunter shoots a woodduck, and then tramples the bejeweled carcass into the mud, lest he fall foul of the law. Such an experience is not only devoid of cultural value, it is actually damaging to all concerned. It does physical damage to woodduck, and moral damage to the hunter, and to all fellow-hunters who condone him. No sane person could find anything but minus value in such "sport."

It seems, then that split-rail and man-earth experiences have zero or plus values, but that ethical experiences may have minus values as well.

This, then, defines roughly three kinds of cultural nutriment available to our outdoor roots. It does not follow that culture is fed. The extraction of value is never automatic; only a healthy culture can feed and grow. Is culture fed by our present forms of outdoor recreation?

The pioneer period gave birth to two ideas which are the very essence of split-rail value in outdoor sports. One is the "go-light" idea, the other the "one-bullet-one-buck" idea. The pioneer went of necessity. He shot with economy and precision because he lacked the transport, the cash, and the weapons required for machine-gun tactics. Let it be clear, then, that in their inception, both of these ideas were forced on us; we made a virtue of necessity.

In their later evolution, however, they became a code of sportsmanship, a self-imposed limitation on sport. On them is a distinctively American tradition of self-reliance, hardihood. woodcraft, and marksmanship. These are intangibles, but they are not abstractions. Theodore Roosevelt was a great sportsman, not because he hung up many trophies, but because he expressed (2) this intangible American tradition in words any schoolboy could understand. A more subtle and accurate expression is found in the early writings of Stewart Edward While (3). It is not far amiss to say that such men created cultural value by being aware of it, and by creating a pattern for its growth.

Then came the gadgeteer, otherwise known as the sporting-goods dealer. He has draped the American outdoorsman with an infinity of contraptions, all offered as aids to self-reliance, hardihood. woodcraft, or marksmanship, but too often functioning as substitutes for them. Gadgets fill the pockets, they dangle from neck and belt. The overflow fills the auto trunk, and also the trailer. Each item of outdoor equipment grows lighter and often better, but the aggregate poundage becomes tonnage. The traffic in gadgets adds up to astronomical sums, which are soberly published as representing "the economic value of wildlife." But what of cultural values?

As an end-case, consider the duck hunter, sitting in a steel boat behind composition decoys. A put-put has brought him to the blind without exertion. Canned heat stands by to warm him in case of a chilling wind. He talks to the passing necks on a factory caller, in what he hopes are seductive tones: home lessons from a phonograph record have taught him how. The decoys work, despite the caller: a flock circles in. It must be shot at before it circles twice, for the marsh bristles with other sportsmen, similarly accoutered, who might shoot first. He opens up at 70 yards, for his polychoke is set for infinity, and the ads have told him that Super-Z shells, and plenty of them, have a long reach. The nock flares. A couple of cripples scale off to die elsewhere. Is this sportsman absorbing cultural value? Or is he just feeding minks? The next blind opens up at 75 yards: how else is a fellow to get some shooting? This is duck-shooting, model 1943. It is typical of all public grounds, and of many clubs. Where is the go-light idea, the one-bullet tradition?

The answer is not a simple one. Roosevelt did not disdain the modern rifle; White used freely the aluminum pot, the silk tent, dehydrated foods. Somehow, they used mechanical aids, in moderation, without being used by them.

I do not pretend to know what is moderation, or where the line is between legitimate and illegitimate gadgets. It seems clear, though, that the origin of gadgets has much to do with their cultural effects. Homemade aids to sport or outdoor life often enhance, rather than destroy, the man-earth drama; he who kills a trout with his own fly has scored two coups, not one. I use many factory-made gadgets myself. Yet, there must be some limit beyond which money-bought aids to sport destroy the cultural value of sport.

Not all sports have degenerated to the same extent as duck hunting. Defenders of the American tradition still exist. Perhaps the bow-and-arrow movement and the revival of falconry mark the beginnings of a reaction. The net trend, however, is clearly toward more and more mechanization, with a corresponding shrinkage in cultural values, especially split-rail values and ethical restraints.

I have the impression that the American sportsman is puzzled; he does not understand what is happening to him. Bigger and better gadgets are good for industry, so why not for outdoor recreation? It has not dawned on him that outdoor recreations are essentially primitive, atavistic; that their value is a contrast-value; that excessive mechanization destroys contrasts by moving the factory to the woods or to the marsh.

The sportsman has no leaders to tell him what is wrong. The sporting press no longer represents sport, it has turned billboard for the gadgeteer. Wildlife administrators are too busy producing something to shoot at to worry much about the cultural value of the shooting. Because everybody from Xenophon to Teddy Roosevelt said sport has value, it is assumed that this value must be indestructible.

Among non-gunpowder sports, the impact of mechanization has had diverse effects. The modern field glass, camera, and aluminum bird-band have certainly not deteriorated the cultural value of ornithology. Fishing, but for motorized transport, seems less severely mechanized than hunting. On the other hand, motorized transport has nearly destroyed the sport of wilderness travel by leaving only fly-specks of wilderness to travel in.

Fox-hunting with hounds, backwoods style, presents a dramatic instance of partial and perhaps harmless mechanized invasion. This is one of the purest of sports; it has real split-rail flavor; it has man-earth drama of the first water. The fox is deliberately left unshot, hence ethical restraint is also present. But we now follow the chase in Fords! The voice of Bugle-Anne mingles with the honk of the flivver! However, no one is likely to invent a mechanical foxhound, nor to screw a polychoke on the hound's nose. No one is likely to teach dog-training by phonograph, or by other painless shortcuts. I think the gadgeteer has reached the end of his tether in dogdom.

It is not quite accurate to ascribe all the ills or sport to the inventor of physical aids-to-sport. The advertiser invents ideas, and ideas are seldom as honest as physical objects, even though they may be equally useless. One such deserves special mention: the "where-to-go" department. Knowledge of the whereabouts of good hunting or fishing is a very personal form of property. Perhaps it is like rod, doe, or gun: a thing to be loaned or given as a personal courtesy, or even to be sold man-to-man, as in the guide-sportsman relation. But to hawk it in the marketplace of the sports column as an aid-to-circulation seems to me another matter. To hand it to all and sundry as free public "service" seems to me distinctly another matter. Both tend to depersonalize one of the essentially personal elements in hunting skill. I do not know where the line lies between legitimate and illegitimate practice; I am convinced, though, that "where-to-go" service has broken all bounds of reason.

If the hunting or fishing is good, the where-to-go service suffices to attract the desired excess of sportsmen. But if it is no good, the advertiser must resort to more forcible means. One such is the fishing lottery, in which a few hatchery fish are tagged, and a prize is offered for the fisherman catching the winning number. The curious hybrid between the techniques of science and of the pool hall insures the overfishing of many an already exhausted lake, and brings a glow of civic pride to many a village Chamber of Commerce.

It is idle for the profession of wildlife management to consider itself aloof from these affairs. The production engineer and the salesman belong to the same company; both are tarred with the same stick.

Wildlife management is trying to convert hunting from exploitation to cropping. If the conversion takes place, how will it affect cultural values? It must be admitted that split-rail flavor and free-for-all exploitation are historically associated. Daniel Boone had scant patience with agricultural cropping, let alone wildlife cropping. Perhaps the stubborn reluctance of the one-gallus sportsman to be convened to the cropping idea is an expression of his split-rail inheritance. Probably cropping is resisted because it is incompatible with one component of the split-rail tradition, free hunting.

Mechanization offers no cultural substitute for the split-rail values it destroys; at least none visible to me. Cropping or management does offer a substitute, which to me has at least equal value, wild husbandry (4). The experience of managing land for wildlife crops has the same value as any other form of farming; it is a reminder of the man-earth relation. Moreover ethical restraints are involved; thus managing game without resorting to predator-control calls for ethical restraint of a high order. It may be concluded, then, that game cropping shrinks one value (split-rail) but enhances both others.

If we regard outdoor sports as a field of conflict between an immensely vigorous process of mechanization and a wholly static tradition, then the outlook for cultural values is indeed dark. But why can not our concept of sport grow with the same vigor as our list of gadgets? Perhaps the salvation of cultural value lies in seizing the offensive. I, for one, believe that the time is ripe. Sportsmen can determine for themselves the shape of things to come.

The last decade, for example, has disclosed a totally new form of sport which does not destroy wildlife, which uses gadgets without being used by them, which outflanks the problem of posted land, and which greatly increases the human carrying capacity of a unit area. This sport knows no bag limit, no closed season. It needs teachers, but not wardens. It calls for a new woodcraft of the highest cultural value. The sport I refer to is wildlife research.

Wildlife research started as a professional priestcraft. The more difficult or laborious problems must remain in professional hands, but there are plenty of problems suitable for all grades of amateurs. In the mechanical field, research has long since spread to amateurs. In the biological field, the sport-value of amateur work is just beginning to be realized. When amateurs like Margaret Nice outstrip their professional colleagues, a very important new element is added: the element of high stakes open to all comers, the possibility of really outstanding amateur performance.

Ornithology, mammalogy, and botany, as now known to most amateurs, are but kindergarten games compared with researches in these fields. The real game in decoding the messages written on the face of the land. By learning how some small part of the biota ticks, we can guess how the whole mechanism ticks.

Few people can become enthusiastic about research as a sport because the whole structure of biological education is aimed to perpetuate the professional research monopoly. To the amateur is allotted only make-believe voyages of discovery, the chance to verify what professional authority already knows. This is false; the case of Margaret Nice proves what a really enterprising amateur can do. What the youth needs to be told is that a ship is a-building in his own mental dry-dock, a ship with freedom of the seas. If you are a pessimist, you can say this ship is "on order"; if an optimist, you can see the keel.

In my opinion, the promotion of wildlife research sports is the most important job confronting our profession.

Wildlife has still another value, now visible only to a few ecologists, but of potential importance to the whole human enterprise.

We now know that animal populations have behavior patterns of which the individual animal is unaware, but which he nevertheless helps to execute. Thus the rabbit is unaware of cycles, but he is the vehicle for cycles.

We cannot discern these behavior patterns in the individual, or in short periods of time. The most intense scrutiny of an individual rabbit tells us nothing of cycles. The cycle concept springs from a scrutiny of the mass through decades of history.

This raises the disquieting question: do human populations have behavior patterns of which we are unaware, but which we help to execute? Are mobs and wars, unrests and revolutions. cut of such cloth?

Many historians and philosophers persist in interpreting out mass behaviors as the collective result of individual acts of volition. The whole subject-matter of diplomacy assumes that the political group has the properties of an honorable person. On the other hand, some economists (5) see the whole of society as a plaything for processes, our knowledge of which is largely ex-post-facto.

It is reasonable to suppose that our social processes have a higher volitional content than those of the rabbit, but it is also reasonable to suppose that we contain patterns of which nothing is known because circumstance has never evoked them. We may have others the meaning of which we have misread.

This state of doubt about the fundamentals of human population behavior lends exceptional interest, and exceptional value, to the only available analogue: the higher animals. Errington (6), among others, has pointed out the cultural value of these animal analogues. For centuries this rich library of knowledge has been inaccessible to us because we did not know where or how to look for it. Ecology is now teaching us to search in animal populations for analogies to our own problems. The ability to perceive these, and to appraise them critically, is the woodcraft of the future.

To sum up, wildlife once fed us and shaped our culture. It still yields us pleasure for leisure hours, but we try to reap and that pleasure by modern machinery and thus destroy part of its value. Reaping by modern mentality would yield not only pleasure, but wisdom as well.
 
You really the wordy stuff, eh?
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None of that is new, and is pretty much the same comments that have been voiced here before. Nice to be reminded it's nothing new, though. If anything, it was worse in the past when "market hunting" was common and species were being wiped out on a wholesale (literally!) basis. Rail guns or new super mags? 3 1/2-inch shotgun shells?
 
Aldo sure was way ahead of his time! Now I'd like to hear the ATV crowd refute him!

ATVs are destroying hunting in many ways. The fat asses who ride them are doing a lot of damage to the environment, the wildlife resource and the tradition. Most of them are too stupid to understand it, some are in denial of the truth, some probably just aren't aware how serious the problem is.
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<FONT COLOR="#800080" SIZE="1">[ 10-15-2003 19:16: Message edited by: Ithaca 37 ]</font>
 
Cali- I thought the godfather/inventor of Wildlife Ecology should have his voice heard on the issue. Nothing new, I realize that, but there's some pretty good nuggets of wisdom in there. Even better when you tie that passage in with some of his other writings. I cut-and-pasted because I didn't want some here to play the Seven Links to Evil Associations on me!!
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Lessee...you posted a lengthy disposition by Aldo Leopold, whom is sometimes quoted by the Sierra Club, who sometimes align themselves with causes detrimental to hunting; therefore you must be an anti-hunter. Heck, I didn't even need 7 steps.
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DG- Do they quote experpts from his hunting stories??
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I'm not a member so wouldn't know!!
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