Thinking Like a Mountain: Leopold, Land Health, and Resilience

Presented by Mike Jones, Stockholm Resilience Centre

'Resilience' has become the buzz-word du jour but what does it mean for human society and the environments within which people live? What does resilience mean for sustainable lifestyles and how might the concepts of resilience science be applied to the real world? One set of answers to these questions can be found in the stories and philosophies of Aldo Leopold. Like many people who live close to the land, Leopold was a natural resilience thinker, long before resilience was developed as a science in the 1970s. This seminar draws on some of Leopold's essays such as Thinking Like a Mountain, Odyssey, Cheat Takes Over and the Land Ethic, which reflect the holistic way in which he thought about land and people and illustrate the processes and concepts of resilience science in simple metaphors.

About the Speaker

Mike Jones is an independent environmental management consultant who has an associate position at the Stockholm Resilience Centre where he is developing the Resilience Alliance Connectors Programme.  The “Connectors” seek to deliver the models and paradigms of resilience science to policy makers and practitioners in simple ways that are useful to them in their search for sustainability. Mike was born and raised on a farm in the UK before emigrating to Africa where he served in Zimbabwe’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management for 23 years in a variety of positions including: ranger, ecologist, management planner, community outreach and tourism development.  Mike has worked for a number of small US NGOs in Africa and the US since 1995 and was the director of Sand County Foundation’s Africa Programme from 2001 until 2008.