Thinking Like a Mountian

For my first choice essay I chose “Thinking Like a Mountain” by Aldo Leopold. I first heard about Aldo Leopold’s essays in Environmental Science. I didn’t get a chance to really explore his essays and decided to take a closer look at this one. Aldo Leopold was said to be before his age. In the majority of his essays he writes about nature and the things that destroy it. In “Thinking like a mountain” he starts out with a very sad, but true story, about killing a wolf as a young adult. How he was trigger happy. He then went on to almost explain the circle of life and how humans have corrupted it. How humans hate wolves because they kill the deer, livestock, and can be dangerous. He wrote that he himself foolishly believed that less wolves would mean more deer which would create a hunter’s paradise. It was not until later in his years that he had looked outside of himself at the bigger picture and saw the true effect. 

The problem with deer is that they eat anything green they can reach. So, Leopold explained how the mountains looked… “Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shear, and forbidden Him all other exercise.” He then goes on to explain how the deer starved to death because their population was too many for the amount of food available in the environment. And how the mountains turned into a desolate place with no greenery and sun bleached bones littering the ground. “I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.” I just loved this sentence! Nobody ever thinks about it this way.

Another of my favorite passages was this, “The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.” Aldo Leopold has reached deeper than anyone I have heard about. The way he perceived life in and of itself - - from the wolf, the deer, and the mountain - - was just amazing to me. And it makes me think about the actions I take and how it each affects the world around me. Who knew one wolf could make a difference. Or how a pack of wolves can save an entire ecosystem from collapsing. Maybe one person could be the same way.

I was thoroughly inspired by this essay “Thinking Like a Mountain”. Aldo Leopold, I am impressed. I encourage everyone to think deeply, to grasp at the meaning of things, to think like a mountain.