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www.biosciencemag.org July 2011 / Vol. 61 No. 7 567

Books

if the focus on the shack and the lab 
reveals true similarities, or if it is a 
device that pulls together the mythol-
ogy surrounding each man, perhaps 
obscuring or ignoring the divergent 
lives they led. After all, Leopold’s shack 
and Ricketts’s lab were different in 
purpose, origin, and use. Whereas the 
lab served to process marine specimens 
for sale to students and researchers, 
the shack was a family retreat, where 
solitude and physical work restored 
the forests that had been lost to the 
saw and plow. Ricketts’s lab was a 
gathering spot for authors and artists 
(frequent guests included John Stein-
beck and Joseph Campbell), whereas 
Leopold’s shack was a quiet refuge 
for family and, at times, a few close 
friends and students. And whereas the 
lab was a rented building squeezed 
between a sardine cannery and busy 
railroad tracks, the shack was in the 
boondocks, surrounded in Leopold’s 
day by exhausted farmlands that were 
an unlikely destination for naturalists 
or tourists.

Similarly, the two men’s person-
alities seem equally disparate: Rick-
etts, loud and boisterous, provided a 
meeting place for the unconventional 
intellectuals who sought freedom in 
the freewheeling California of the 
early twentieth century. If Ricketts 
provided refuge and inspiration for 
their great works, it was through 
the unvarnished life he shared with 
them, which included field excur-
sions to Mexico and Alaska, as well 
as many days in California tide pools 
and festive evenings in the lab. Leo-
pold, the quiet professor, spent most 
of his time at the shack with his 
children and students—planting 
trees, making detailed natural his-
tory observations, cleaning, fixing, 
and restoring, while cementing the 
personal bonds that come with hard 
work. Seen in this light, Ricketts 
and Leopold are a dynamic duo, 
yin-and-yang voices that together 
transformed natural history into 
environmental science and made the 
leap from insular and specialized 
disciplines to a new field with sweep-
ing societal relevance.

most closely identified with their 
lives and insights: Leopold’s shack 
in the Wisconsin Sandhills and Rick-
etts’s waterfront lab on Monterey 
Bay. By weaving their stories together 
around these unassuming buildings, 
Lannoo manages to create a connec-
tion in the mind of the reader, a con-
nection that did not exist between 
these men, who never met. By forg-
ing this link, the author integrates 
the terrestrial and the marine, the 
introversion of the researcher with 
the wanderlust of the naturalist, the 
discipline of science and the passion 
of activism. By tying these men to 
the modest structures where their 
most sweeping ideas came to life, 
Lannoo makes a connection that is 
both unexpected and insightful. And 
although their private lives could 
hardly have been more different, 
their impact on society is conver-
gent and complementary. From the 
reader’s perspective, the author’s 
appreciation of both the men and 
their contributions is inspiring.

Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab is 
a short and entertaining read, a book 
that fans of both Leopold and Ricketts 
will appreciate. Each reader is likely 
to recognize one character and be 
introduced to the other. The reverence 
I hold for the shack and the ideas that 
flowed from it gave me entry to Rick-
etts’s life, through his lab, and I expect 
the reverse will be true for other read-
ers. Yet one cannot help but wonder 

its historic and contemporary impor-
tance to human society, and how and 
why plant organisms will continue to 
evolve novel compounds in a process 
that is both dynamic and ongoing.

MICHAEL J. BALICK
Michael J. Balick (mbalick@nybg.org) 
is vice president for botanical science, 

director, and philecology curator of the 
Institute of Economic Botany at The New 
York Botanical Garden, Bronx, New York.

TWO “DESTINED HUMAN
DELIVERERS” OF 

ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE

Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab: 
The Emergence of Environmental-
ism. Michael J. Lannoo. University of 
California Press, 2010. 216 pp., illus. 
$24.95 (ISBN 9780520264786 cloth).

Aldo Leopold, forester and wild-life biologist, and Ed Ricketts, 
marine biologist, were two early 
twentieth-century naturalists whose 
works have reverberated across the 
decades and influenced a genera-
tion of environmental scientists and 
activists. Through intense observa-
tion and uncommonly clear writ-
ing, both men were able to develop 
and articulate an understanding of 
nature that linked the appetites of a 
rapidly industrializing nation to the 
vulnerability of its environment, long 
before the Earth Day awakening and 
the polarizing politics that consume 
current science and policy debates. 
If every discipline has its heroes, 
Leopold and Ricketts are two of the 
rock stars of environmental studies.

With Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s 
Lab: The Emergence of Environmen-
talism, Michael Lannoo has crafted 
a book designed to pull these two 
larger-than-life figures into focus, 
and he does so by linking their very 
different personalities to the places 

doi:10.1525/bio.2011.61.7.12

Ricketts and Leopold are a 

dynamic duo, yin-and-yang 

voices that together trans-

formed natural history into 

environmental science and 

made the leap from insular 

and specialized disciplines to a 

new field with sweeping soci-

etal relevance.



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568 July 2011 / Vol. 61 No. 7 www.biosciencemag.org

The central idea that emerges from 
this interesting volume is the sense 
that these men led complimentary 
lives. Together, they express what was 
then an emerging, uniquely Ameri-
can form of environmental aware-
ness that still defines a distinctive 
philosophical direction. A century 
earlier, a different pairing of intel-
lects and personalities collided to 
define a prior movement in literature 
and philosophy. Ralph Waldo Emer-
son, the renowned poet, and Henry 
David Thoreau, the anarchic natu-
ralist, followed shared insights but 
contrasting lifestyles that, together, 
embodied the Transcendentalist 
movement. This creation articulated 
an intellectual foundation on which 
science and nature would be united 
to confront the future that Thoreau 
predicted and that Ricketts and Leo-
pold encountered in their twentieth-
century lives. Without putting too 
fine a point on it, Lannoo invites 
us to see the subjects of his book as 
two lives intertwined in an effort to 
articulate a modern environmental 
ethic grounded in empiricism and 
committed to action—action to save 
nature from the unwitting march 
of a society utterly unaware of its 
destructiveness and its dependency 
on the natural world.

The subtitle of this book—The 
Emergence of Environmentalism—is 
somewhat misleading. The emergence 
of environmentalism is not addressed 
directly, nor are these men’s roles in 
fostering it explored in any depth. 
Instead, we get a sense of the resonance 

of environmental science as a rigor-
ous intellectual pursuit, grounded in 
method, informed by observation, and 
leavened with an awareness of its rel-
evance to society.

Lannoo writes that “the discipline 
of ecology, as understood by both 
men, could not be neatly categorized 
into more traditional academic fields.” 
Through the interdisciplinary nature 
of their inquiry, something new and 
critically important was discovered 
and carefully communicated to the 
rest of us. Emerson wrote about how 
knowledge and nature are “still hid 
and expectant... as if each waited... for 
a destined human deliverer.” Lannoo’s 
homage to Leopold and Ricketts is a 
convincing claim that the two men, 
drawing on creativity and social con-
science, were so diligent in their com-
mitment to natural history that they 
uncovered a set of vital truths for those 
who came after.

THOMAS D. SISK
Thomas D. Sisk (thomas.sisk@nau.

edu) is a professor of ecology in Northern 
Arizona University’s School of Earth Sci-
ences and Environmental Sustainability, 

in Flagstaff.

MAKING SENSE OF REMOTELY 
SENSING VEGETATION

Remote Sensing of Vegetation: Prin-
ciples, Techniques, and Applica-
tions. Hamlyn G. Jones and Robin A. 
Vaughan. Oxford University Press, 
2010. 400 pp., illus. $55.00 (ISBN 
9780199207794 paper).

An ever-expanding constellation of Earth-observing sensors provides 
us with a virtual tsunami of data, much 
of it now freely available. But chan-
neling this digital torrent into useful 
information about the vegetated land 
surfaces requires a skillful blending of 
radiation physics, image processing, 

their work has enjoyed with those who 
discovered their writings long after the 
authors were gone. That subsequent 
generation, those born into the era of 
environmental crises, read Leopold’s 
Sand County Almanac and Ricketts’s 
Between Pacific Tides with wonder, 
impressed that the authors had such 
clear thoughts about such important 
ideas, and that they were able to write 
about them so artfully that these titles 
continue to speak today with compel-
ling voices. Yet there are others who 
more fully capture the activist roots 
of the environmental movement; per-
haps most prominent among them is 
Rachel Carson, who galvanized the 
nation around the decline of nature 
with the publication of Silent Spring
in 1962. In that context, Leopold, 
Ricketts, and the Transcendentalists 
before them were rediscovered and 
embraced by a new generation, one 
that gave rise to the great environ-
mental leaders of the late twentieth 
century. The emergence of the envi-
ronmental movement has changed the 
world, but with almost seven billion 
humans now (three times the popula-
tion of the world when Leopold and 
Ricketts were writing), the planet is 
changing even faster and, thus far, not 
in a manner that would give either 
man much cheer.

Can their words inspire the next 
generation as it has the past two, and 
will the emergence of environmental-
ism contribute to the adoption of the 
ethical stance on conservation that 
emerges from their fusion of natu-
ral history and philosophy? Lannoo 
points in this direction, saying in the 
book, “Leopold shows us what to do, 
Ricketts shows us how to do it.” But 
he takes a different path to the book’s 
conclusion, stepping out of the flow of 
environmentalism and into the field 
that his two subjects shared without 
question: natural history. By recount-
ing their decades of detailed observa-
tions and the depth of their insights, as 
well as their love of being in the field 
and experiencing nature directly, Lan-
noo highlights not so much the emer-
gence of environmentalism as a social 
movement, but rather the emergence doi:10.1525/bio.2011.61.7.13