Dale Earnhardt was the most redneck redneck to ever redneck and he took the confederate flag off his car because his Black housekeeper said she didn’t want to see it. It’s really not that hard to not be an asshole.
The man credited with inventing American conservation ethics spent the first years of his career killing wolves.
Aldo Leopold became a US Forest Service ranger in 1909. His job was to eliminate large predators from the Southwest.
He shot wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, any carnivore he could find. He was good at it and believed what the forestry establishment believed: fewer predators meant more game.
One afternoon he shot a mother wolf and watched her die. He wrote later that he saw "a fierce green fire" dying in her eyes, and he realized he had been wrong about everything.
It took him decades to work out what "wrong" meant. Without wolves, deer populations exploded. Without deer checks, forests got eaten down to nothing. Without forests, erosion swept topsoil to the sea.
The predator he had spent his twenties killing had been holding the whole system together.
Leopold spent the rest of his life articulating what he now understood. In 1949, the year after he died fighting a brush fire on his neighbor's land, his book A Sand County Almanac introduced readers to the concept of a "land ethic."
It became the philosophical foundation of modern conservation.
The man who helped eradicate American predators became the person who taught us why they mattered.
He got there by being willing to say, out loud, that he had been wrong.
🚨⚠️ Marc Cucurella: “The moment Enzo Maresca left, it had a big impact on us”.
“If you asked me, I would NOT have made this decision. To make a change like that, the best thing is to wait until the end of the season...”, told @TheAthleticFC.