What Thinking Like a Mountain Has To Teach Us About Thinking Like a City

This article was originally published, in slightly different form, on Seth Zeren’s Substack, Build the Next Right Thing. It is shared here with permission. All images for this piece were provided by the author.

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One of my favorite things to do is introduce people to books from outside the usual urbanist reading lists that have important things to contribute to building stronger towns. Today, I’m introducing Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. I hope that you get something from it and feel inspired to read Leopold, yourself.

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) was an early pioneer of the American land conservation movement and the science of ecology. A Sand County Almanac is a beautifully crafted collection of his nature writing, essays, and journals, including many critiques of the misguided management strategies he developed in his youth working with the Forest Service. I first encountered Leopold and the Almanac as a graduate student at Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Science in 2009, as part of a celebration of the centennial of Leopold’s graduation.

Two essays from the Alamac stood out to me and I refer back to them often. The first is from his reflections on his time in Arizona and New Mexico and is titled “Thinking Like a Mountain.” His earliest job in the forest service was hunting wolves, coyotes, and bears, under the logic that “because fewer wolves would mean more deer, that no wolves would be a hunters paradise.” But without predators, the deer populations exploded, denuding the mountains of vegetation, and in the end, fewer deer than before. Leopold writes,

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. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.

So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea… 

We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness … but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.

Leopold and family at “the Shack” in the sand county where they put the restoration ecology into practice. (Source: Aldo Leopold Foundation.)

This insight is cut from the same insight as Jane Jacobs’ critique of modernist planning, in that it treats cities as simply complicated machines when in fact they are complex ecological systems. Overly orderly, top-down interventions not only fail to achieve your ends, but in fact weaken the whole system, leaving it impoverished—whether the system is a city after urban renewal or a mountain stripped of its wolves. 

The second essay, perhaps Leopold’s most famous, is entitled “The Land Ethic.” Leopold observes that we have expanded the areas of life subject to ethical propriety over the centuries, shrinking those areas “judged by expediency only.” Leopold lays claim to the idea of ecological ethics, that concepts of right and wrong can be extended from human interactions to the interactions between humans and the land. If land is mere property and our relationship to it is “strictly economic, entailing privileges, but not obligations,” then if it is profitable for a human to clear-cut a plot or farm it into dust, what can we say against it? But if we have ethical obligations to be members and citizens of the land-community, we can forge what we would now call a “sustainable” relationship, maintaining the fertility of the land, the health of the ecosystem, and the prosperity of the humans living within the land community. 

Aldo Leopold with quiver and bow seated on rimrock above the Rio Gavilan, in northern Mexico, while on a bow hunting trip in 1938. (Source: Aldo Leopold Foundation / Wikipedia.)

I think these are great questions for those of us who build and manage cities, as well. What are our reciprocal rights and responsibilities to the city? What do we owe our buildings, not just what are we allowed to extract from them? If we start to see ourselves as members of these places, places that we have inherited from previous generations, and that we will pass down to future generations, what must we change about our attitudes and practices? This is not a matter of strict preservationism. Leopold is not calling for us to keep each tree in just the place we found it when we arrived—rather, it’s about the systems and the relationships that produce and reproduce a healthy ecosystem. Similarly, I see a healthy city constantly in the process of recreating itself, adapting, growing to meet demand, shrinking to economize in lean times, and so forth. 

(Source: Aldo Leopold Foundation.)

Leopold goes on to critique the approach, then and now, of pursuing conservation as a matter of more education, regulation, and economic incentive, because none of those changes the fundamental ethical relationship between humans and their land community.

It defines no right or wrong, assigns no obligation, calls for no sacrifice, implies no change in the current philosophy of values… In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.

[A] system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided. It tends to ignore, and thus eventually eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value, but that are (as far as we know) essential to its healthy functioning. It assumes, falsely, I think, that the economic parts of the biotic clock will function without the uneconomic parts. It tends to relegate to government many functions too large, too complex, or too widely dispersed to be performed by government.

(Source: Aldo Leopold Foundation.)

Leopold's writing does not easily fit into today’s left-right binary, but connects squarely with modern nonpartisan movements such as Strong Towns. We must recognize our limits, the limits of complexity, and indeed embrace limits; learn to think like a mountain. Or for us urbanists: learn to think like a city. What do we lose when we eliminate messiness, formalize creativity, simplify processes to allow for top-down regulation and management of the urge to exploit land, buildings, people? 

As Leopold calls for unleashing the evolutionary process for the Land Ethic by no longer “thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem, examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, alongside what is economically expedient. 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.” 

A 100-ton steam shovel, circa 1919. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

An Urban Land Ethic would be a practice of stewardship that would involve both the preservation of what we have, but also building new buildings and changing our streets and parks to meet the needs of evolving cities. To “think like a city” is to understand that a healthy city or town responds to changes around it, evolves, and hopefully becomes better fitted to its context and more resilient—like any healthy ecological system. So, the stewardship of our cities and towns is not a passive role. New buildings will be required to meet charge for integrity, stability, and complex, interactive growth and change. The urban land system is a reciprocal relationship between people, buildings, and environment. No part can escape another. The health of the system depends on repairing and strengthening the relationships between each member.

Leopold continues pragmatically, “it of course goes without saying that economic feasibility limits the tether of what can or cannot be done for land. It always has and it always will.” But the land, and the city, are so much more than just expedient economic transactions. We are called to be stewards of a place and its buildings that were passed down to us and that we will pass down to others.

“By and large, our present problem is one of attitudes and implements. We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam-shovel, and we are proud of our yardage. We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many good points, but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use.” 

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Seth Zeren is a recovering city planner turned neighborhood developer, advocate, and educator. Seth is a founding member of Strong Towns and occasional contributor over the years. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to the East Coast for college and settling down in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lives with his wife and two young kids. He writes at Build the Next Right Thing.