No nature without fear

Aldo Leopold saw this in the eyes of a dying wolf: when we no longer fear nature, we are on the road to its destruction

by Shawn Simpson + BIO

Aldo Leopold sitting on rim rock above the Rio Gavilan in northern Mexico, while on a bow hunting trip in 1938. Photo courtesy the Aldo Leopold Foundation

is a postdoctoral research fellow in environmental philosophy at North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa. He is the author of Art as Communication: Aesthetics, Evolution, and Signaling (2024).

Edited byCameron Allan McKean

In the early 1900s, in a remote mountain forest on the central border of New Mexico and Arizona, a patrol of wilderness rangers sitting high on a shelf of rim rock noticed what appeared to be a deer fording the river below. But as the animal emerged from the water onto the riverbank, they saw that it was a mother wolf, soon joyfully greeted by a pack of her grown pups. In those days, it was United States federal policy to eradicate predators, and forest rangers would shoot and kill the ones they encountered on sight. Dutiful to their task, the men aimed their rifles and fired into the canines until there were no bullets left.

Down by the river, the rangers reached the mother wolf just in time to see what one of them, a young man named Aldo Leopold, would later describe as a ‘fierce green fire dying in her eyes’. In that moment, Leopold writes, he realised that what they had done was deeply wrong. They had not yet learned how to ‘think like a mountain’.

In the dying eyes of a wolf, Leopold caught a glimpse of something that changed the course of his thinking about nature. He would spend the rest of his life making sense of that glimpse, and hoping to share the lessons from that day on the riverbank. But much of what he learned remains misunderstood.

Can we, Leopold asked, accept that Earth does not exist for our comfort? Can we accept a world that depends on predators and other forces we cannot control? Can we accept our fear? For Leopold, these questions pointed in the same direction: can we learn to think like a mountain?

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Leopold was born in 1887 in Burlington, Iowa, to parents of German ancestry. His father, Carl, owned a desk-making business. His mother, Clara, managed the family home. Carl frequently took his young son hiking and hunting, instilling in him a deep love of nature. So great was Leopold’s interest in the natural world that, in 1907, he enrolled in the nation’s first school of forestry, which had been established at Yale University seven years earlier.

Aldo Leopold, aged six, in 1893. Courtesy the Aldo Leopold Archives, University of Wisconsin-Madison

After graduating, Leopold chose a life spent largely outdoors. His first professional role was with the US Forest Service, where he served as a wilderness ranger assigned to forests in New Mexico and the then-scarcely populated Arizona Territory. His responsibilities included patrolling by horseback, as well as interacting with hunters, ranchers and other visitors. He also dealt with emergencies, such as wildfires, rescues and poaching. In many ways, he became a jack-of-all-trades and an expert of the land – as any good ranger must.

Apache National Forest Officers in 1909; Leopold is number 11. Photo courtesy the Arizona Memory Project

Writing about his experiences, Leopold also became a kind of environmental philosopher. Trained in forestry and employed in the field for much of his life, he thought deeply about the animals, plants, soils and waters he encountered in his work, and the relationships that bound them together. He came to care deeply about these things, and that care motivated him to protect them. For him, conservation was a moral commitment.

A proper relationship with the environment depends on learning to see the world and our place in it entirely differently

Leopold was not an academic philosopher in any traditional sense. He eventually became professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin, Madison – the first post of its kind – but most of his publications and research output from that period were of a technical nature or in the form of field reports and almanac entries. His posthumously published book A Sand County Almanac (1949) is different. The first part of the book primarily consists of Leopold’s observations of ecological change on his farm in Sand County, Wisconsin, but later sections include essays that articulate a mature environmental philosophy emerging from his days as a ranger. The story of the ‘fierce green fire’ is shared in one of these essays. In the final part of the book, Leopold outlined what was, in the context of the US around the mid-20th century, a radically different way of understanding and thinking about our relationship with nature. He writes:

It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense.

In the decades since Sand County’s publication, Leopold’s injunction to ‘think like a mountain’ has been widely interpreted and debated across environmental philosophy and related disciplines. Some scholars have approached this notion as a form of systems thinking, foregrounding long temporal horizons, ecological interdependence, and the limits of human management. Others interpret it as an early articulation of a more-than-human ethics, aligning Leopold’s thought with later work on multispecies relations and nonhuman value. In an article for the academic journal Critical Perspectives on Accounting in 1996, Frank Birkin describes Leopold’s call as a challenge to dominant economic rationalities, specifically those instrumental, anthropocentric and reductionist ways of valuing land that treat ecological systems primarily as economic resources. Meanwhile, the anthropologist Anand Pandian in 2014 places Leopold in conversation with contemporary anthropological work such as Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013), drawing attention to shared concerns with how environments register and respond to human interventions. Across these interpretations, we find a common thread: a proper relationship with the environment depends on learning to see the world and our place in it entirely differently. This is a call Leopold heard when he looked into the eyes of the dying mother wolf: ‘I realised then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain.’

But somewhat forgotten in the interpretations and debates his ideas have generated is a point that is uncomfortable and easily overlooked. Thinking like a mountain, for Leopold, is about learning to live in fear.

A Sand County Almanac (1949). Courtesy Peter Harrington Rare Books

Like Leopold, I was inspired by the outdoors when I was a young man, and spent time hiking and camping with my family throughout Arizona. In high school, I was fortunate to be assigned Leopold’s Sand County by my biology teacher, a man who regularly volunteered with the US Forest Service conducting surveys of Arizona’s bears. After finishing my master’s degree in philosophy in New York City, I decided to take a break from academia and joined the Forest Service myself.

Philosophy felt like a funny background for a young ranger. Most of my new colleagues had studied biology or ecology and spent more time sleeping on the ground than on a mattress. But it turned out that almost all of them loved, and were well versed in, the work of certain philosophers, especially John Muir, Edward Abbey and, yes, Aldo Leopold. One lead ranger even made a habit of reciting a different passage from Muir at the end of each workday.

During my time in the field, I kept a copy of Sand County on me. On patrol in the mountains, little things – a flower, a sunset, even a mosquito – would spark memories of Leopold’s words. In the early years, I thought I had understood his insistence to think like a mountain. But as time went on, I realised I had not yet realised just how far the lesson extended.

Leopold in 1911. Courtesy the Arizona Memory Project

In the essay ‘Escudilla’ (Spanish for ‘bowl’), Leopold recounts the story of a grizzly bear named Old Bigfoot who once roamed the summit of a large mountain named for its distinctive concave peak. Old Bigfoot, so the story goes, lived alone on Escudilla and kept to himself except for coming down once each spring to kill and eat a cow belonging to the local cowboys. From Leopold’s writing, one gets the sense that the bear added a sort of ‘aura’ to the mountain simply by living there:

I once saw one of his kills. The cow’s skull and neck were pulp, as if she had collided head-on with a fast freight.

No one ever saw the old bear, but in the muddy springs about the base of the cliffs you saw his incredible tracks. Seeing them made the most hard-bitten cowboys aware of bear. Wherever they rode they saw the mountain, and when they saw the mountain they thought of bear. Campfire conversation ran to beef, bailes, and bear. Bigfoot claimed for his own only a cow a year, and a few square miles of useless rocks, but his personality pervaded the county.

I felt a similar awe when I went to work in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. There were no grizzlies there anymore – they had all been wiped out by the 1920s – but there were still plenty of mountain lions. The presence of the mountain lions could be felt everywhere: the mark of a pawprint in damp soil, the sound of the cat’s scream in the middle of a cold night. Knowing lions were in those woods put a certain level of fear into you as well as a certain level of respect. You learned to enter the mountains cautiously.

There have been only 29 fatal mountain lion attacks on humans in North America since 1868

Late one night while driving a dirt road through the forest, I was about half a mile away from the ranger station when I turned a corner to see four cubs and a mother lion, who stopped in front of me. The piercing, threatening gaze of the mother hit me like an arrow, and my so-called lizard brain took control. Though I was safely separated from the lions by a protective layer of metal and glass, I instinctively reached to lock the vehicle’s doors before regaining some self-awareness and laughing at the silliness of my manoeuvre.

Back at the station, I recalled that all summer I’d been leaving the door to my cabin open at night to let in the cool air. After that, I no longer left my door open.

A mountain lion caught on camera. Courtesy the National Park Service/Public Domain

Although human attacks are rare, all rangers thought of the mountain lions whenever they were on a hike or a ride in the Sierra. In total, there have been only 29 fatal mountain lion attacks on humans in North America since 1868 and, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, a person is about 1,000 times more likely to be struck by lightning than to be attacked by a mountain lion. Yet fatal encounters do occur. In 2024, a 21-year-old man was killed by a mountain lion in the Sierra Nevada – the first such incident in two decades. In January 2026, a 46-year-old woman was found dead following a mountain lion attack in Colorado’s Roosevelt National Forest. Such events are tragedies. Usually for both parties. Mountain lions are almost always tracked down and killed in the aftermath.

Old Bigfoot’s end came in much the same manner. A government trapper was dispatched to kill the great bear. After repeated failures using poison, traps and other devices, the trapper rigged a rifle to a tripwire in a narrow gorge through which he wagered only the bear was likely to pass. Sure enough, Old Bigfoot walked into the tripwire and shot himself.

Officials believed that exterminating bears would protect cattle and settlers – veritable progress in action. But when Leopold tells the story of Old Bigfoot, he makes a series of what I think are best interpreted as laments. He expresses sadness that the bear was killed in such a deceitful manner. He mourns the state of the bear’s fur at the time of his death, which was patchy and hadn’t yet had a chance to grow thick. Leopold describes the situation as an ‘insult’.

Leopold mentions that, seeing the mountain now, ‘you no longer think of bear’

I see him trying to make the case that wild animals, even those predators we humans have tended to demonise, have certain rights. Leopold seems to suggest that Old Bigfoot should not have been killed in the way he was and shouldn’t have been killed in the condition he was in. There’s a sort of dignity and respect that Leopold appears to believe is owed to the bear.

The idea of providing rights to animals like bears was uncommon in the Western world at that time. As Leopold explains, for much of our history, bears and the like were seen as ‘dragons’ to be slain. Many species today are viewed in the same way, from sharks to mosquitoes.

Leopold’s main focus in ‘Escudilla’, however, is on whether ‘progress’ is always a good thing and to some extent what it even is. The government trapper thought he was doing a good thing by making the land safer for cattle and people. But in the end, this form of progress led to the loss of something special. Leopold mentions that, seeing the mountain now, ‘you no longer think of bear’.

We might interpret Leopold here as saying that the land didn’t just lose the bear but also some of what modern rangers and researchers would call its ‘wilderness character’. It just doesn’t feel as wild, rugged or untrammelled anymore. Human feelings, however, are only part of the story. More is at stake if we hope to think like a mountain.

In the Sierras. Photo supplied by the author

When I started working in California’s Sierra Nevada, the other rangers and I didn’t think of grizzly bears, except perhaps to mourn their absence. The same was true of the wolves that once roamed the region. And yet, we all recognised how different the place would be if those animals were still present. There would have been fewer tourists and hikers, perhaps more respect for the land. Much of the mountains would have remained untrammelled. Would the Sierra still be the Sierra if it someday lost its last big predators – the mountain lions? We didn’t think so.

What Leopold noticed during his time as a ranger was that all forests where wolves had been exterminated ended up facing a similar problem. After enough generations, plants would end up being overgrazed by a booming deer population. And, in turn, the next generation of deer would starve. This phenomenon is a kind of ecological collapse known as a ‘trophic cascade’ and is a core concept in the environmental sciences. Leopold was one of the first to notice the pattern and the role that fear played in it.

The perceived risk of predation reorganises animal behaviour across space and time, with cascading effects

‘Thinking like a mountain’ is what Leopold hadn’t been doing all those years he was killing wolves. To think this way, he writes, is to realise that a mountain lives in mortal fear of its deer just as the deer live in fear of the wolves, and just as humans sometimes live in fear of predators, too. It means seeing how everything is connected and how you cannot intervene in just one part of some environment without affecting some other aspect. We see this sentiment echoed in the work of the American naturalist John Muir. ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself,’ he wrote in 1869, ‘we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.’ For Leopold, this makes the role of fear crucial. Things being ‘attached’ or interconnected in the right way sometimes necessitates fear. Its presence – at least some forms of it – is a feature of a healthy biotic community, not something to be eliminated.

Contemporary ecology has given this intuition a more formal expression. Researchers now speak of a ‘landscape of fear’ or an ‘ecology of fear’ to describe how the perceived risk of predation reorganises animal behaviour across space and time, often with cascading effects on vegetation, waterways and biodiversity. From this perspective, fear is one of the mechanisms by which ecological relationships remain dynamically balanced. What Leopold grasped intuitively is strikingly close to this idea, which has been developed most prominently by ecologists such as John Laundré and William Ripple, whose work on wolves, elk and vegetation recovery shows how the mere presence of predators can reorganise entire ecosystems through fear alone, rather than just through direct killing.

Leopold’s point highlights how tricky it is to know what really counts as ‘progress’. Overcoming our fears – of attacks, reduced game and crops, or other things that might negatively impact our lives – through interventions like eradication can sometimes counterintuitively lead to more problems. As Leopold puts it: ‘too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.’

The rangers I worked with were aware of this lesson from Leopold, but it was easy to forget in the field.

In my own case, I nearly neglected it while working in what’s known as the Dinkey Lakes Wilderness. The Dinkey is, to many people’s surprise, one of the most beautiful wildernesses in the Sierra. It is also one of the least visited places in the range. The Dinkey’s name probably plays a role in this. According to local lore, it was named after a dog called Dinkey who saved his owner from a grizzly bear in the area, but without knowing the story the title suggests that the area is just filled with a bunch of ‘dinkey’ or small lakes.

One of the best aspects of the Dinkey is the solitude. Most of the time, there are no visitors, unlike the popular trails nearby. In the Dinkey, you can find animals seldom seen in the other parts of the Sierra.

Part of what makes the Dinkey Lakes so special are the mosquitoes. For most of the summer, the area is routinely clouded with them. Rangers wear mosquito nets over their heads the entire time they work there. At breakfast, they spoon oatmeal into their mouths under their nets. In the evening, they give up their traditional after-work swim in the lakes and instead dive as fast as they can into the protection of their tents.

As we live in fear of mosquitoes, the Dinkey must live in fear of people, as must other wild places

One day, while hiking through thick plumes of these little vampires, I found myself wishing they were all dead. ‘What harm,’ I thought, ‘could killing all the mosquitoes really do?’ Soon after, a father and son came running towards us down the trail, frantically waving their arms to keep the insects away. The mosquitoes were simply too overwhelming, the pair explained, and so they were cancelling their week-long camping trip.

At that moment, I realised the mosquitoes functioned as little guardians of this place. Without them, the Dinkey would not be what it is. As we live in fear of mosquitoes, the Dinkey must live in fear of people, as must other wild places. Fortunately for the Dinkey, mosquitoes have historically been in ample supply.

And so, I have slowly gained an appreciation for mosquitoes in something like the way Leopold appreciated the wolves and Old Bigfoot. I have learned to appreciate the specific kind of fear they generate.

The researchers Marcus Hall and Dan Tamïr anticipate mosquitoes functioning as unwitting custodians of wild areas by influencing how animals move through the world. As they note: ‘Metric tons of flying biomass certainly alter natural processes, whether as foodstuff for other organisms or as modifiers of animal behaviour, as in the case of caribou and Homo sapiens who move or migrate to avoid them.’ The mosquitoes of the Dinkey are among the conditions that make solitude and wildness possible.

In this respect, mosquitoes function much like large predators do elsewhere. They shape patterns of movement, tolerance and use through fear and discomfort.

Mosquitoes kill more humans than does any other animal on Earth. More than 700,000 people die from infectious diseases spread by mosquito bite each year. New mitigation technologies and methods, including genetically modified mosquitoes and bacterial inoculations, are being deployed to reduce mosquito populations and incidences of mosquito-borne illnesses. But if we get rid of mosquitoes in some areas, there is a real possibility that those ecosystems will become more hospitable to humans. And this may eventually come back to bite us. Earth needs its wilderness spaces.

This connects us to another important aspect of Leopold’s philosophy and a much-contested term in recent decades.

In a 1921 essay for the Journal of Forestry, Leopold articulates an early definition: ‘By “wilderness” I mean a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks’ pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.’ By ‘two weeks’ pack trip’, Leopold means a trip by horse and mules in the backcountry.

Green lagoon, Colorado River trip, 1922. Courtesy the Aldo Leopold Archives, University of Wisconsin-Madison

It’s an attractive definition but it has its shortcomings. Many wildernesses are not devoid of the works of man, especially works made by Indigenous peoples or ranger cabins, and some wildernesses are such that you simply cannot carry out a pack trip in them. I can say from experience that the length of a pack trip depends on innumerable factors. Yet Leopold’s definition has inspired generations of rangers and conservationists, and has helped spark a debate that continues to this day over just what counts as wilderness, why it matters, and how best to protect it.

Related to ‘wilderness’ are deeply philosophical questions about the value of a similar term: ‘wildness’. What sort of attitude should we take toward feelings of fear and the unruly, uncontrollable things that can cause them? Philosophers have long differed on the answers. The Stoics tried to conquer fear by changing how we judge events, rather than by trying to control the events themselves. Other philosophers, following in a tradition beginning with Aristotle, have held that fear is not simply a matter of how we think about the world: sometimes fear can be a mark of good judgment, rather than something to be overcome or avoided. We find a similar divide on the question of wildness.

Some philosophers have seen wildness as a flaw to be overcome. Perhaps the most famous quote to this effect comes from the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who wrote that the life of man in the state of nature is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. Other thinkers, such as the anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan today, argue that wildness isn’t just valuable or good, it’s a necessary condition of genuine human freedom. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that thinkers like Zerzan suggest we abandon civilisation and return to pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer forms of life.

Leopold seems to sit somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. He wants to acknowledge that fear is real and caused by external things, but he doesn’t want us to deal with fear simply by eliminating those external threats or reframing them out of existence. He also cares about wildness but he’s not calling for us to abandon our jobs or modern plumbing. Instead, Leopold offers a different way of approaching these issues.

Leopold effectively places humans on equal footing with all other parts of the biotic community

‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community,’ Leopold writes. ‘It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’ This is also part of what is involved in ‘thinking like a mountain’. It is about enlarging our responsibility to encompass more species, and different kinds of time – especially deep time. Leopold calls it a land ethic: ‘The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.’ This changes humans from being conquerors of nature to community members.

By taking such a view, Leopold effectively places humans on equal footing with all other parts of the biotic community, long before such an idea was commonplace in Western thought. What’s more, the principle doesn’t outright prohibit things like hunting, fishing, meat-eating or many other activities often considered inappropriate if not immoral by modern environmental ethics or movements. Instead, Leopold is asking that, when we engage in our ethical calculations, we consider other species and ecosystems more deeply. You can think of his question about ‘integrity, stability, and beauty’ as a kind of consequentialist query. Leopold is asking us to judge human actions by their long-term effects on the environment, broadly construed to also include animals, plants, water and rocks. Crucially, he is shifting the focus away from human experience and toward the wider community, including those who have ‘perspectives’ that are particularly difficult for us to share, such as those of predators (or mountains). The value being maximised isn’t just the greatest amount of good for humans, but something akin to ecological flourishing among biotic communities. It is a pattern of durable, interdependent life, with all its cascading complexities – and fears.

From the Aldo Leopold Archives, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Leopold’s principle, of course, isn’t perfect and it’s easy to see his lack of philosophical training. He doesn’t clearly define many of the key terms he uses, including ‘beauty’, ‘integrity’, ‘stability’ or ‘biotic community’. He also doesn’t explain the limits of his principle. In The Case for Animal Rights (1983), the philosopher Tom Regan argues that an unqualified version of Leopold’s land ethic could lead to a sort of eco-fascism. For example, if killing an innocent person would tend to preserve the beauty, stability and integrity of the biotic community, then it seems, following Leopold’s principle, it might be right to kill them! Leopold would likely reply that some rights – such as the right to life – should be assumed when using his principle. This would make sense given the way he talks about certain animal cases. But that still leaves unclear exactly which rights are to be extended to humans, animals, plants and so on. How should these rights be weighed against one another, and under what circumstances could they be overridden? Would the mosquitoes end up on Death Row if we used the land ethic? I’m not sure. Leopold’s principle might work as a good heuristic or quick rule of thumb but it’s not an ideal principle that can easily and non-controversially be applied to all cases.

Leopold’s legacy runs deep. In conservation, he is partly responsible for the creation of federal wilderness areas and for many reforms in game and natural resource management. His legacy in environmental philosophy is a weighty one as well.

Some of Leopold’s greatest contributions, however, are a bit more meta-philosophical in nature. He showed, first, how much philosophical insight can be inspired by lived, on-the-ground experience, especially in applied domains. It’s difficult to imagine someone writing ‘Escudilla’ or many of Leopold’s essays without having gone through those experiences themselves. Leopold also demonstrated the continued philosophical power of storytelling. His use of narrative, parable and allegory is integral to the work his ideas do, allowing ethical insight to emerge through concrete encounters rather than abstract principles. In this respect, Leopold stands as a quiet counterexample for those philosophers who suspect that narrative and experience merely muddy the waters of serious thought.

In some towns, residents have displayed bumper stickers declaring ‘Kill a wolf, save an elk’

Today, Leopold’s land ethic no longer appears so radical in its broad outlines. Many of us now accept that humans are part of ecological systems, not masters standing outside them, and that those systems have value beyond their economic role. But the more difficult implication of Leopold’s view remains unresolved. Membership in a biotic community is easy to affirm in the abstract; it becomes far more complicated when that community includes wolves, bears, mountain lions or clouds of mosquitoes. Not everyone is prepared to live alongside creatures that frighten us, inconvenience us or harm us.

Crayon and ink drawing by Aldo Leopold of a Forest Service house at Tres Piedras, New Mexico, c1911. Courtesy the Aldo Leopold Archives, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Signs of this reluctance are easy to find in the forests where Leopold once worked as a ranger. In Arizona and New Mexico, an interagency effort involving state wildlife departments, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and tribal partners has reintroduced the Mexican grey wolf – the very species Leopold helped to exterminate as a young man. In some towns, residents have erected billboards depicting wolves in crosshairs, or displayed bumper stickers declaring ‘Kill a wolf, save an elk.’ Similar resistance has greeted predator reintroduction elsewhere. In the 1990s, France and Spain reintroduced brown bears to the Pyrenees – the same species as Old Bigfoot – and both have faced sustained opposition from shepherds, farmers and politicians ever since. Current plans to reintroduce other predators as part of rewilding programmes will likely be met with similar concern. This is where Leopold’s insistence on fear becomes particularly controversial.

Leopold does not ask us to erase ourselves from the land, nor to self-sacrificingly suppress our needs and concerns for some abstract whole. He is more demanding. Can we enlarge our sense of responsibility, stretch our moral imagination across species and timescales, and learn to live with the discomforts that genuine membership entails? Can we learn to coexist with the fear that arises from our relationships with the natural world? The reality is that not everyone is ready. Perhaps that hesitation marks the point where a commitment to land – to thinking like a mountain – demands more than we are willing to give.

Leopold does not offer a formula for resolving that tension. All he offers is a new way of seeing, learned by a riverbank, in the eyes of a dying wolf. The challenge he leaves us is whether we can learn that lesson without repeating the same acts of destruction. A mountain without wolves, a wilderness without mosquitoes or a forest without anything that ‘pushes back’ may be beautiful to us, but a world without fear would soon turn ugly.

Eventually, it wouldn’t look like our world at all.

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