Ep 24 / Buddy Huffaker, Aldo Leopold Foundation

The executive director of the Aldo Leopold Foundation joins us to discuss Aldo's land ethic and how we apply it today.

Watch or Listen: Apple Podcasts / Spotify / YouTube

I’m not a gambling man, but I’d be willing to place a pretty large bet that the overlap in the Venn diagram of Ecosystem Member listeners and Aldo Leopold readers is sizable. However, Meta is still insisting on making AI chatbots of modern celebrities instead of legends of environmental philosophy, so I am still unable to have Aldo himself as a guest on the podcast.

So, I got the next best thing.

Our guest for this episode of the podcast is Buddy Huffaker, executive director of the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

Using Aldo’s writing and specifically his idea of a land ethic, the Foundation helps promote responsible land stewardship and make sure that Leopold’s work is still as relevant today as when ‘A Sand County Almanac’ was published 75 years ago.

In this episode, we start at the foundations with Buddy.

We talk about what the land ethic is and why it is still so relevant today, Aldo’s journey to the stories in ‘A Sand County Almanac’ and the transformational moment in one of Aldo’s other seminal essays ‘Thinking Like a Mountain’. We also talk about how the Foundation partners with people like Robin Wall Kimmerer to extend the conversation beyond just Aldo’s ideas to share a larger land ethic story in the context of today’s world.

Make sure to visit the Foundation’s website at aldoleopold.org and follow it on Instagram. Many of the events the Foundation holds are streamed online, so even if you can’t make it to The Shack in Wisconsin, you can gather with others all over the world to examine Aldo’s ideas.

"Leopold's land ethic is not a fact but a task." - Wallace Stegner, "Living On Our Principal", Wilderness/Spring 1985

Thanks for listening -

Rick