[exploding pie chart]

Learn about the life of Aldo Leopold, the father of conservation and how the idea of Wilderness was inspired. See about Green Fire here. Thanks to the Seattle Theatre Group, The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, The Aldo Leopold Foundation, and the US Forest Service for sponsoring the showing of this film in Seattle. The MBSNF has a bit about it on their website as well: [url=http://www.fs.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsinternet/!ut/p/c4/04_SB8K8xLLM9MSSzPy8xBz9CP0os3gjAwhwtDDw9_AI8zPyhQoY6BdkOyoCAGixyPg!/?ss=110605&navtype=BROWSEBYSUBJECT&cid=STELPRDB5334016&navid=180000000000000&pnavid=null&position=News&ttype=detail&pname=Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest- News & Events]See here[/url]. I just bought my tickets! Can't wait to see this.

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i would love to see this .. but i hope to be in the mountains .. thx for posting .. here's the trailer

Some background on the man (from Wikipedia): Early on Leopold was assigned to hunt and kill bears, wolves, and mountain lions in New Mexico. Local ranchers hated these predators because of livestock losses. However, Leopold came to respect the animals. He developed an ecological ethic that replaced the earlier wilderness ethic that stressed the need for human dominance. Rethinking the importance of predators in the balance of nature resulted in the return of bears and mountain lions to New Mexico wilderness areas. By the early 1920s, Leopold had concluded that a particular kind of preservation should be embraced in the national forests of the American West. He was prompted to this by the rampant building of roads to accommodate the "proliferation of the automobile" and the related increasingly heavy recreational demands placed on public lands. He was the first to employ the term wilderness to describe such preservation. Over the next two decades he added ethical and scientific rationales to his defense of the wilderness concept. In one essay, he rhetorically asked "Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?" Leopold saw a progress of ethical sensitivity from interpersonal relationships to relationships to society as a whole to relationships with the land, leading to a steady diminution of actions based on expediency, conquest, and self-interest. Leopold thus rejected the utilitarianism of conservationists like Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt. By the 1930s Leopold was the nation's foremost expert on wildlife management. He advocated the scientific management of wildlife habitats by both public and private landholders rather than a reliance on game refuges, hunting laws, and other methods intended to protect specific species of desired game. Leopold viewed wildlife management as a technique for restoring and maintaining diversity in the environment rather than primarily as a means of producing a shootable surplus. The concept of "wilderness" also took on a new meaning; he no longer saw it as a hunting or recreational ground but as an arena for a healthy biotic community, including wolves and mountain lions. In 1935 he helped found the Wilderness Society, dedicated to expanding and protecting the nation's wilderness areas. He regarded the society as "one of the focal points of a new attitude—an intelligent humility toward man's place in nature. Leopold explains: The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. This sounds simple: do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter down river. Certainly not the waters, which we assume have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off sewage. Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate whole communities without batting an eye. Certainly not the animals, of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species. A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these ‘resources,’ but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.

[Kim Brown]

Can't wait to see this on the 18th. I've heard from a few folks that have seen it back east, that it's very, very good. I expect it to sell out. If you haven't read his Sand County Almanac, do! So well-written.

[Snowbrushy]

Thanks for the heads up. I've not studied the man. I will now.

[outdoorgrrl]

Thanks for the reminder! My husband and I bought tickets

[rbuzby]

Leopolds "A Sand County Almanac" is a classic of environmental literature. http://www.aldoleopold.org/books/Default.asp