Fire on the Mountain

Abstract

Aldo Leopold's essay 'Thinking Like a Mountain' was more than a parable about a redemptive personal moment; it was the fruition of a larger effort on Leopold's part to effectively communicate the fundamentals of a 'land ethic'. I explore striking narrative antecedents to Leopold's 'green fire' moment, including writings by Henry David Thoreau and Ernest Thompson Seton, and articulate why wolves provided the quintessential totem animal for communicating a larger ecological 'drama'. Both these literary antecedents and the essay's ongoing-sometimes surprising-impacts are worth exploring, not just because of the high regard in which the essay itself is held but because Leopold succeeded in navigating a problem that persists in our own time: the gap between scientifically informed understandings of the world and effectively communicating those understandings to the public.