National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine. She is coeditor of The Science Writers’ Handbook and lives in White Salmon, Washington.
Nijhuis applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, and reported the following:
Readers who apply the Page 99 Test to Beloved Beasts will find themselves at a turning point in the life of Aldo Leopold, the American wildlife ecologist best known for his essay collection A Sand County Almanac. In the spring of 1924, after fifteen years in New Mexico and Arizona with the U.S. Forest Service, Leopold somewhat reluctantly accepted a more prestigious position with the agency in Madison, Wisconsin. Five days after leaving for Wisconsin, the district forester for the Southwest signed off on Leopold’s plan for the Gila National Forest, creating the nation’s first designated wilderness area.Learn more about the book and author at Michelle Nijhuis's website and the W.W. Norton website.
In many ways, Leopold is the central character of Beloved Beasts, and while the events on page 99 are not particularly dramatic at first glance, they marked Leopold’s transition from a respected government official to the far-seeing writer and thinker he would become in later life. Within the Forest Service, he had already begun to agitate for policies designed to protect species from decline and landscapes from devastating erosion, and the Gila Wilderness was the enduring legacy of that work. After four restless years at the agency’s Forest Products Laboratory in Wisconsin, Leopold left the Forest Service, and in 1934, he joined the University of Wisconsin as a professor of game management—the first position of its kind in the country, and perhaps the world. At the university, he incorporated lessons from the relatively new science of ecology into his work, deepening his and his students’ understanding of the relationships among species and the relationships between species and their habitats.
Leopold’s vision of the relationship between humans and the rest of life, most fully expressed in A Sand County Almanac and his other late writings, was both rooted in the past and startlingly prescient. Unlike many conservationists before and since, Leopold understood that humans could and should play a constructive part in conservation—that they could cast off their role of “conqueror of the land-community,” as he called it, and accept the humbler responsibility of “plain member and citizen.” His departure for Wisconsin, recounted on page 99 of Beloved Beasts, was an important step in his own journey toward plain citizenship.
--Marshal Zeringue
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