Eric Suesz
From time to time, we like to collect our favorite quotes, sayings, and statistics about water and share them with readers. Today we’re celebrating one of the pioneers of hydrology: Luna Leopold.
What strikes us about this quote, which Leopold wrote over half a century ago, is not just that it feels true but also timeless.
Water is the most critical resource issue of our lifetime and our children’s lifetime. The health of our waters is the principal measure of how we live on the land.
– Luna Leopold
The health of a community’s water really is an excellent measure of a community’s success. But it also makes us a bit sad. It’s currently Leopold’s childrens’ lifetime. If he were still with us, would he say that we’ve done enough to make water sacrosanct?
Who was Luna Leopold?
Born in 1915 to biologist and conservationist Aldo Leopold, Luna followed in his father’s footsteps, devoting his life to studying ecology, hydrology, and nature. As the first chief hydrologist for the USGS, Luna lived and breathed the outdoors while helping to develop the field of fluvial geomorphology, always working to understand how rivers were shaped by the landscape.
Shaped by water – and his father’s reputation
After Luna’s father Aldo passed away of a heart attack while battling a wildfire, Luna edited and published his father’s collection of essays Sand County Almanac. It’s a classic of conservationist thought in which Aldo poses simple questions about man’s relationship to nature, always striving to find the right balance between unchecked expansion and conservation of the land – questions which still bedevil us today.
One of Aldo’s most popular essays, Thinking Like a Mountain tackles this issue deftly through metaphor to show how cattle farmers who remove wolves from the landscape can’t foresee the unexpected and deleterious effects that their removal will have on the entire ecosystem.
You can support the Aldo Leopold Foundation by buying Sand County Almanac directly from them.
All of which is to say that both Aldo and Luna strongly believed that water management should be governed not just by economic, social, and political concerns (the extent of focus of water policy back then) but also informed by geology, geography, and the climate. His idea of a “land ethic” expanded the definition of community beyond just us humans and our needs to include plants, animals, soil, and – of course – the actual water itself. To him, leaving those constituencies out of the conversation was short-sighted at best, unethical at worst.
Aldo’s essays were praised and shared by both conservationist-minded public-policy makers and back-to-the-land hippies once it was publshed as a paperback in 1968. It quickly rose to prominence thanks to its popularity during the first ever Earth Day in 1970. The book has sold over 2 million copies and has secured Aldo’s place in the pantheon of American conservationists.
Luna kept up the family’s reputation, publishing his own influential books Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology, which became an essential textbook for hydrologists, and essay collections like A View of the River. Luna died in 2006 at the age of 90, but the family’s influence continues via the Aldo Leopold Foundation.
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