Leopold's shack and Ricketts's lab: the emergence of environmentalism

Abstract

Thoreau’s hut at Walden Pond; John Muir’s Sierra cabin; Aldo Leopold’s central Wisconsin shack; Ed Ricketts‘s Monterey lab; Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor Joyous Garde gazebo; John Haines’s Tanana River, Alaska, homestead; Jim Harrison’s northern Michigan granary; and many other equally intriguing writing aeries, hideaways, and studios: in a country that worships hugeness, amplitude, blockbuster size, and the trendiest mega deal, much of America’s best thinking and writing—especially about the environment—has been carried out in small, intimate, tucked-away buildings situated at the edgy, limnal intersection between the civic and natural worlds. We are not talking “man caves,” those obscenely fashionable retreats designed for solipsistic personal entertainment, but hand-hewn shacks, cabins, huts, sheds, and their like. Unpretentious, serviceable domains, set away from the constant disruptions of daily life, act as “base camps for exploration” (5), as Michael Lannoo rightly claims in this delightfully written monograph. Biologist, conservationist, ecologist, and recognized authority on amphibians, the author is Professor of Anatomy and Cell Biology at Indiana University’s School of Medicine in Terre Haute, where he directs the Lannoo Lab and, like Leopold and Ricketts, seems as much at home in the lab as in the field. (Lannoo’s most recent book, The Iowa Lakeside Laboratory: A Century of Discovering the Nature of Nature, continues his dual fascination.) Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab: The Emergence of Environmentalism is enlivened throughout by Professor Lannoo’s admiration for two of his “longtime heroes” (xiii). But far from creating uncritical hagiography, Lannoo’s personal investment gives his project the right blend of intimate air and scholarly objectivity, due in large part to his impressive familiarity with all relevant scholarship on both major figures, and to his quickly paced narrative style. It is not often that an academic book can be called a page turner, but this one certainly is. Functioning as both hard fact and as conceptual trope, Leopold’s Baraboo, Wisconsin, shack (originally a chicken coop) and Ricketts’ Pacific Biological Laboratory allow Lannoo to link two pioneering figures in twentieth-century environmental awareness. “The concept of ‘shack,’” Lannoo claims, “works as a metaphor for a grounded, bottom-up, facts-based approach to thinking and to