Aldo Leopold’s “Thinking Like a Mountain”
Aldo Leopold was an American forester and is considered the Father of Wildlife Biology. In “Think Like a Mountain,” Leopold penned one of his most quoted lines, “The Green Fire,” about a wolf Leopold watched die after he and others with him gunned it down. However, in the last paragraph, Leopold gives some timeless wisdom. Leopold states:
We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. 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.
In recent months there surfaced an idea in public discourse that the safety of the people is a function of government. This author postulates that perhaps security has been mistaken for safety. A measure of safety is necessary for daily life; however, to what extent should safety measures go?
