Correction Lines: Essays on Land, Leopold and Conservation by Curt Meine. 2004. Paperback: 245 pages. Published by Island Press. ISBN 1559637323
Reviewed by Bill Adams

It is a pity Christmas is past, for this book should be on the shelf of every conservationist with an interest in the past or who is thinking seriously about the future of conservation. Correction Lines is a book of 11 essays by the writer and biologist Curt Meine, who in 1988 published a biography of Aldo Leopold. Here he reflects on Leopold's ideas, looking both backwards at the development of conservation in the USA and forwards to the future.

Aldo Leopold is most widely known for the book of essays A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949, a few months after his death fighting a bush fire on a neighbour's farm in Wisconsin. The Almanac became one of the great books of conservation. One essay, 'The Land Ethic', continues to be quarried for insights and quotes by conservation writers and activists, classically: 'we abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect'. The Almanac was warmly reviewed when published, steadily winning readers; by the mid-1960s is had sold 20,000 copies. Then a series of paperback editions were produced and A Sand County Almanac was adopted by a new generation of young readers among the swelling ranks of the environmental movement. The book became, and has remained, one of a small number of classics of conservation. I read it in my first term as an undergraduate, and like many other conservationists, it changed the way I thought about the world.

Without doubt, the Almanac proves that Aldo Leopold was a fine writer. Yet he was not simply, not even primarily, a writer: the essays that became A Sand County Almanac were rejected by two publishers before Oxford University Press took them on, because they found the collection too diverse in form and argument. Leopold's posthumous global fame as an environmental guru in fact came at the end of a remarkable and active life in what we would now probably call conservation policy. He graduated from the Yale Forest School, and joined the US Forest Service. He always took as obvious that forests were about more than trees (his reaction to the regimented and biologically impoverished tree farms of Germany in 1935 was typical), and he became a leader in the development of game management as a science-based practical endeavour. He chaired the American Game Policy Committee in the 1920s. His book Game Management (1933) was the first text in this field, and it was as to teach this subject that he joined the University of Wisconsin in the same year. Between then and his death in 1948, his work at the university, his experience of ecological restoration in his bottomland farm along the Wisconsin River, and his growing scope and skills as an essayist form the context for the book that would so remarkably outlive him.

In Correction Lines, Curt Meine paints an affectionate portrait of Leopold through a series of sketches. The central five chapters of the book describe the evolution of Leopold's thinking, the creation of the Almanac, and its reception. More importantly, he places these insights into their historical context. The first three chapters trace the origins of American conservation in the Progressive Movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s, and its evolution through the twentieth century, and he discusses the rise of conservation biology in the 1980s. In the final three essays, he builds on Leopold's writing to look forwards, exploring how the idea of the land ethic might evolve in the future, and in a moving and thought-provoking reflection on the events of September 11th 2001 'Home, Land, Security'.

Curt Meine makes it very clear that Leopold's thinking still has much to offer those interested in the sustainable use of living resources. In particular, Leopold's career and writing demonstrated that the line between utility and preservation was far from simple. In 'Leopold's Fine Line', Meine shows how Leopold grew to see this distinction, and the divorce of beauty and utility in conservation as unhelpful. Leopold was no romantic, and no politician. But he was a conservationist of remarkable insight.

The title of Correction Lines is taken from the solution that Jefferson's land surveyors had in fitting a universal rectilinear grid to the curve of the earth. Every so often, they had to insert an east-west line to make the grid fit. Here north-south roads take a double right angled bend, as the rationalizing power of modernity adapts to the reality of the globe. Meine's analogy is that such lines mark places where reality and theory meet. He suggests one must take stock, looking backwards and forwards, to think about the route ahead. That is the perspective he offers in Correction Lines. This is a fine book: intelligent, thoughtful and beautifully written. Find it and enjoy it.

Bill Adams is Professor of Conservation and development at the University of Cambridge. He is at wa12cam.ac.uk . His book Against Extinction: the story of conservation (Earthscan, London) was published in 2004.

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