Aldo Leopold, Esotericism, and the Legibility of the World

In this paper, I point to neglected esoteric currents informing and animating much of Aldo Leopold’s pioneering work in environmental ethics, especially currents relating to what we might call the legibility of the world. Building on  Ashley Pryor’s work which uncovered Leopold’s debt to P D Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum, I point to other elements of of Leopold’s resonance with Ouspensky and the esoteric tradition. In particular, I show how thoroughly Leopold and the Western esoteric tradition alike draw on a deeper tradition of reading the world’s hidden legibility. I suggest, moreover, that Leopold’s recapitulation of this esoteric tradition was also a work of democratization and emancipation, a making exoteric both of the world’s legibility and of a land ethic partially incubated in esoteric traditions but now brought into the great outdoors and offered to all.