Flip-Flops in Winter with Leopold

These are not Aldo Leopold's feet.  To my knowledge, Leopold never wore flip-flops.

It is getting to be political season again and there is talk of the flip-floppers, the wafflers, the crowd pleasers who will switch their opinions as it suits them.  Although I understand the concern—it is nice to feel that we can trust what someone says is based in truth—flip-flopping can be the logical outcome of new information or greater awareness.  (Oh how I wish some people that I know and love would flop on some issues.)  In science, we should always be able to flip or flop if the evidence overwhelming says we should do so.  So the talk of flip-floppers always makes me as uncomfortable as actual flip-flops (what a questionable piece of footwear). 

Our Conservation Biology class is finishing A Sand County Almanac – I have read it a few times now and I must say it does get better with each read as I get older and, naturally, wiser.  I listened to an interesting video of one of Aldo Leopold’s former students who read some of the essays and told Leopold that they sounded a bit preachy and that he needed to explain how he came to his conclusions.  In essence, I think, the student was saying, reveal your flip-flops.  In “Thinking Like A Mountain” Leopold does this.  I have come to think of this passage as his road to Damascus as where in the bible Saul comes to a dramatic realization that he’s after the very people whose side he should be on and in a blinding revelation he flip-flops and becomes Paul.  Leopold’s revelation may have not been quite as swift and dramatic, but his trigger happy finger had been more than ready to shoot at any wolf his eye saw, a practice encouraged and condoned as part of their pervasive predator-control.  He says:

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.  I realized 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.  I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise.  But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.” (P 130) 

There’s even a light in Leopold’s story—perhaps we should have renamed Aldo at this point.  (Waldo?)  It was years before he formally changed his position on predator control, but something shifted for him here.  He flipped.  In light of new observation and additional evidence, he changed his position.  We are lucky he did so—otherwise, we might not have this book and we might be less likely to admit our own mistakes and be ready to reverse course and hope that in the end we can make up for our past sins.