A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

Regular readers have been aware of my recent revisit to Aldo Leopold's classic text on conservation A Sand County Almanac.  My initial post exposed my fangirl status, and my Sand County Saturdays highlighted some of the best bits from my reading. 

I reread because our Awake and Engage(d) Documentary Film Series was screening the new film on Leopold and his life's work: Greenfire.  Local storyteller Jim Pfitzer hosted the screening and did a beautiful and thoughtful recitation of Leopold's famous essay "Thinking Like a Mountain."

This gorgeous essay is where the title of the film originates.  In it, Leopold is reflecting on a life in and of nature, and he does something terribly uncommon in today's society: he admits he was wrong.  Early in his life, he had been a proponent of exterminating big game predators.  His support of this act came from his love of hunting and his belief that "because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise" (130).  As a result, wolves and other large animals were hunted to near-extinction.  In revising his view on the subject, he recounts an instance many years before when he had killed an old wolf and watched her die, watched as "a fierce green fire [died] in her eyes" (130).  Though he did not write about the experience at the time, it clearly took hold in his life and became a touchstone event in his understanding of wildness and the importance of symbiosis in the environment.

The last section of A Sand County Almanac is titled "The Upshot," and in it, Leopold compiles and asserts his most important theses regarding the land ethic, wildlife, and wilderness.  Some of it is repetitive, but for the most part it is a clearly argued demand for little more than a sense of appropriate balance in the world.  To consider humanity merely one of the myriad species inhabiting this place and to see ourselves as the ones most capable of its destruction would mean an unheard of transformation in global health.  I mean that in both possible interpretations: the health of the globe and the health of all those on the globe.  To refuse to seek that balance will mean continued examples of exploitation, destruction, and short-sighted decisions based on economic rather than ecologic profit.  We are all but there now, and the awareness of that fact destroys me on a somewhat daily basis.

I am a political person, and I definitely have a short fuse (thankfully, I also have a short memory) on many of these issues.  Sitting in the same room with me while I read the newspaper is .... well, let's just say it's hard to sustain a real conversation because I'm also going to be hollering at whatever article or letter to the editor has got me going this time.  If you do not have a similar leaning, you might want to exeunt stage left because I'm about to talk politics.

Rick Santorum's latest attacks on President Obama's "phony" theology have got me in a twist.  And yes, I did intentionally use the Fox News version of this story, so no one can think I'm just beating a liberal drum.  My problem with Santorum is not only that I disagree with him on about a hundred different points.  My problem is that, as a Christian, I feel ridiculously misrepresented by his brand of Christianity.  Man isn't here to serve the earth?  What does the Genesis account of Creation say was first on God's priority list?  What about Genesis 2:15?  "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it" (NIV).  Santorum also said, "The Earth is not the objective.  Man is the objective."  The objective of what?  I would hope that as a Christian, he would say that glorifying God was the objective rather than glorifying man.

Perhaps you see this theological rant as a tangent.  I do not.  I see the view of "man as the objective" as the single biggest threat to a land ethic.  Leopold says we must strive for balance.  In doing so, we must try to think like a mountain, to recognize the interconnectedness of it all, and for the Christian, to see God's work in that interconnectedness and to honor it.

Sand County Sunday (oops!)

A single silence hangs from horizon to horizon. (Leopold 95)

I fell asleep on the couch last night before getting around to Sand County Saturdays, so Sand County Sunday it is!  This week is the screening of the film that launched my revisit of Aldo Leopold's classic, so I'll look forward to wrapping up the book and posting on the film next weekend.  This weekend, however, I'm just dwelling on the beautiful phrasings (like the sentence under the photo at top) and keen observations this book is so full of.

Leopold, for those that don't know anything about him, is considered one of the first great conservationists in America.  He was an expert on wildlife management and was one of the founders of the Wilderness Society.  His book, A Sand County Almanac, wasn't published until after his untimely death in 1948 (he was fighting a grass fire on a neighbor's property), but it has left a tremendous legacy, especially regarding an ethical view of land.

He writes:

There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it.  Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls, is still property.  The land relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations. ... All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.  His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate. ...The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. ... In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. (203-204)

 And remembering he is writing in the 40s, I laugh to consider what he would think now:

Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets.  He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow.  Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a 'scenic' area, he is bored stiff.  If crops could be raised by hydroponics instead of farming, it would suit him very well.  Synthetic substitutes for wood, leather, wool, and other natural land products suit him better than the originals.  In short, land is something he has 'outgrown.' (223-224)

And yes, I write this post on a laptop, sitting on my couch with artificial heat warming the room and a synthetic blanket over my legs.  I am in part the true modern he describes, but I do so hope I will never outgrow the wonder of the woods or my pleasure in working the soil or my fascination with the creatures that populate both.

Sand County Saturdays

See how the squirrel is all hunched in one position and eyeing me cautiously?  That's how I've felt for the last three days.  Except I've been on a couch or in the bed, and the thing I've been eyeing so warily is the pain that seems to be out to get me.  I'm pretty sure all I've got is some sort of infection caused by the MASSIVE amount of drainage that has set up camp in my throat, and I do feel much better today - thankyouverymuch -  so perhaps it will head out by tomorrow.  I'm playing it safe and resting a great deal and managing to get a lot of reading done as well.  Most of it has been of the magazines that have been sitting around for 2 weeks variety, but I have also spent some time with Mr. Leopold in Sand County and am happy to report he still has things to say that thrill my soul.  I made it to December just after filling my bird feeders, so as he explained about the habits of the chickadee, I was listening to the insistent chirp of the first cardinal who had discovered my action.  I never can tell for sure if he is announcing it to loved ones or crowing proudly at being the one to find it first.

Here are some of the things I loved in Part One: A Sand County Almanac.

From February:

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm.  One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.  To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue.  To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside. (6)

April:

The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters.  They live on the land, but not by the land. (34)

July:

The erasure of human subspecies is largely painless - to us - if we know little enough about it.  A dead Chinaman is of little import to us whose awareness of things Chinese is bounded by the occasional dish of chow mein.  We grieve only for what we know. (48)

September:

...things hoped for have a higher value than things assured. (54)

October:

And when a flock of bluebills, pitching pondward, tears the dark silk of heaven in one long rending nose-dive, you catch your breath at the sound, but there is nothing to see except stars. (61)

November:

 A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land. (68)

December:

This is especially likely to happen on some gloomy evening when the snow has buried all irrelevant detail, and the hush of elemental sadness lies heavy upon every living thing. (87)

I hope these snippets inspire you to pick up a copy of A Sand County Almanac.  And if your weekend allows it (and you aren't confined to the couch as I am), consider taking a walk in the woods somewhere.

Sand County Saturdays - "things natural, wild, and free"

There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.  These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.



Thus begins the Foreward to Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, a work I recently posted about as being one of the most life-changing in my experience thus far.  I have decided to reread it in preparation for a documentary film screening upcoming in February, and I am hoping to make Saturdays until then an ongoing commentary on my reading of it.  Today begins my return to Sand County.

In the foreward, Leopold says, "Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them.  Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free" (vii).  This question is even more true today, perhaps, than when Leopold penned it in 1948.  Leopold divides this work into three sections: the first focuses on his family's "refuge from too much modernity," known to them as 'the shack.'  Of the shack, he writes:

we try to rebuild, with shovel and with axe, what we are losing elsewhere.  It is here that we seek - and still find - our meat from God. (viii)

Undoubtedly, this book had a profound impact on me almost 15 years ago, and I have a smallish collection of quotes from it copied down in a little wire-bound notebook.  This passage is not among them, and I'm certain it resonates with me now because of the differences time and life have brought since then.  One of the reasons we are moving again is, in a sense, a part of seeking refuge, seeking the kind of "meat from God" that I believe comes through investing in, engaging with, and giving back to a place.  We have been missing that kind of investment for awhile, and though our current situation has brought many blessings, it is this kind of commitment to axe and shovel that has me so energized about our upcoming transition.

Leopold closes the Foreward with a brief explanation of what is meant by his land ethic, and I quote it rather lengthily here because I truly believe it could not be more important nor more true.

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.  When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.  ... That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.  That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.  These essays attempt to weld these three concepts.  Such a view of land and people is, of course, subject to the blurs and distortions of personal experience and personal bias.  But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy.  The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs that it has lost the stability necessary to build then, or even to turn off the tap. (viii-ix)

In section 1, Leopold divides his essays by the month and organizes chronologically, and though I will not stretch my reading of this book over the whole year, it makes a tidy kind of sense to be starting in January with him.