As the Bush folly slithers toward its slimy end, as McCain stumbles deeper into the politics of amnesia, as ABC covers another breaking story about lapel pins … here’s a little interlude, in this late-night lull before the PA primary news kicks in, to remember a departed but not forgotten voice.
“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.”
Today (for you west coasties) was the 60th anniversary of the passing of ecologist Aldo Leopold, who died April 21, 1948 of a heart attack while fighting a fire on a neighbor’s Wisconsin farm. Beyond his connection to the many excellent eco-diaries posted on DailyKos, Leopold’s voice remains relevant in other ways.
"Sometimes I think that ideas, like men, can become dictators... I doubt if there exists today a more complete regimentation of the human mind than that accomplished by our self-imposed doctrine of ruthless utilitarianism. The saving grace of democracy is that we fastened this yoke on our own necks, and we can cast if off when we want to, without severing the neck."
Aldo Leopold is remembered as many things: the father of game management; an activist who in the early 1930s called for boycotting products manufactured with child labor or in an environmentally harmful manner; an advocate for threatened animals two generations before the Endangered Species Act; the architect of the nation’s first Wilderness Area; a political player who helped push through many environmental laws; a founding member of the Wilderness Society; and a researcher who, nearly twenty years before Rachel Carson, warned about DDT.
“Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?”
Although he wrote hundreds of scientific and wildlife articles, Leopold will likely be remembered as the author of A Sand County Almanac, a collection of essays published posthumously in 1949. The book is often credited with launching the discipline of environmental ethics in the late 1960s.
“In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”
Following Henry David Thoreau, George Marsh, and John Muir, as well as Native American and Eastern beliefs, Leopold urged humans to alter their relationship to nature – from detached exploitation to a bond grounded in humility, love, and cooperation.
“Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.… Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.”
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For me, A Sand County Almanac was a book that, upon first reading, I probably shrugged and thought, “Eh.” I was assigned the essays in an undergraduate English class, and it seemed a nice, sweet nature book, but nothing profound.
“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot... For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.”
It would take me several more readings and years of experience to understand why foresters, ecologists, wildlife managers, geologists, historians, and environmental activists rank Sand County as one of the most important land-use books ever written, second only to Walden. I don’t doubt that years from now Leopold and his little book will be talked about in the same breath with Thoreau. One thing that makes A Sand County Almanac so arresting is its compact but forceful style - a beautiful book by a committed lover of the land community.
“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: ‘What good is it?’ If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good.… Who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
Leopold lived during a time (1887-1948) when many “modern” Americans were discovering the outdoors: the establishment of the Boy Scouts, Wilderness Society, Sierra Club; the growth of tourism and recreation in public lands; and the creation of agencies like the National Park Service. But he saw beyond land itself to the core of our character, writing about the "futility of trying to improve the face of the land without improving ourselves." He understood that our identity is a byproduct of the land - that we shape it and are shaped by it, and if we destroy the environment we risk undermining democracy itself.
“Many of the attributes most distinctive of America and Americans are [due to] the impress of the wilderness. … Shall we now exterminate this thing that made us Americans?"
Spend time with Leopold and you begin to sense that he isn’t just talking about trees, rivers, mountains, and critters. Leopold’s “Land Ethic,” his capstone essay, begins with a story about the murder of Odysseus’s slave girls – his point being that just as we once considered slaves “property,” we continue to think of nature the same way, and he calls for us to extend moral considerability to all lands, creatures, and people. For Leopold, the Land Ethic is not merely an environmental end in itself, but a means to a more just society, because our relationship to nature speaks volumes about how we treat one another.
“To change ideas about what land is for is to change ideas about what anything is for.”
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LEOPOLD TODAY
Given the endless list of environmental challenges today, as well as the political, economic, and social dynamics that frame these challenges, we might pause on this day and ask what Aldo would say. It’s not too hard to imagine what he would think about some of the ugly messes we've gotten ourselves into.
• Exploited by the Entitled. Unimpeded by facts, powerful voices, and commonsense, nations continue their assault on the planet. The violence is especially apparent in and by the U.S., which represents about 6% of the earth’s population but chews up and spits out a quarter of the earth's resources:
“In short, twenty centuries of ‘progress’ have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account, and a high opinion of himself, but not the capacity to live in a high density without befouling and denuding his environment, nor a conviction that such capacity, rather than such density, is the true test of whether he is civilized.”
• More Studies Please. Politicians and pro-growth windbags, the supplicants of hubris and greed, tell us global warming is not human-caused, but is instead the result of normal climate fluctuations. As they undertake "more studies" and stall real progress, the administration's corporate moneybags dig up and shit all over our lands, skies, and streams:
"Evolutionary changes, however, are usually slow and local. Man's invention of tools has enabled him to make changes of unprecedented violence, rapidity, and scope."
• Growth Machines. Propaganda manufactured by chambers of commerce and trumpeted by boosters and elected officials decrees that “bigger is better,” and that in order to achieve bigness communities must choose between “jobs or the environment”:
“Can anyone deny that the vast fund of time, brains, and money now devoted to making our city big would actually make it better if diverted to betterment instead of bigness?”
• Connections Nada. Fewer children today experience nature (visits to parks by kids are way down), and many citizens are estranged from the land and its creatures – the resources that sustain life and connect us to the largest imaginable story:
“When we hear [the crane's] call we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of the incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.”
• Geographies of Nowhere. Towns, cities, and public space itself are becoming more and more homogenized. Our drive-thru landscapes are blanketed with car-worshipping sprawl and Big Box hubs that trash hillsides, plaster over beauty, lack any true sense of place, and are not sustainable:
“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the ... community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
• War on Terror (and Trees). With economic and cultural fear as their main tool, politicians argue that environmental regulations must be relaxed or even ignored, in order to extract the resources necessary to fight terror, or some other flim-flam excuse:
“If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left in my opinion worth fighting for; or to be more exact, a completely industrialized United States is of no consequence to me.”
• Industrial Farming. The crushing combine of multinational agribusiness separates farmers from the land, undermines soil health, destroys local economies, and churns out plastic food:
“Bread and beauty grow best together. Their harmonious integration can make farming not only a business but an art; the land not only a food-factory but an instrument for self-expression, on which each can play music to his own choosing.”
• Red, White and Blue = Green Bucks. Jingoism in the form of car magnets and lapel pins gets passed off as “patriotism,” but, as in Leopold’s day, it is often a ruse that serves corporate forces and political machines:
“A hundred percenter in making the flag fly and the eagle scream, he is awkward in self-government. Worshipping commerce, he is slow to regulate its own abuses…. Is it too much to hope that this force, harnessed to a finer ideal, may some day accomplish good as well as big things?”
• Don't Fence Me In. Immigration is used as a wedge issue. An Iowan of German stock, Leopold married into a Hispanic family in 1912, and then worked among a collision of cultures in the Southwest for 15 years. One can only imagine what he would think about a fence being erected on the border with his beloved Mexico - a giant scar that will interrupt ecosystems more than human traffic:
“It was here [in Sonora] that I first clearly realized that land is an organism and that all my life I had seen only sick land, whereas here was a biota still in perfect aboriginal health.”
• Heckuva Job, Greenie. The Environmental Protection Agency, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, and U.S Forest Service don’t have the budgets or authority to do their job. In some cases, their leadership is stacked with lackeys who don’t believe in the mission, and critics accuse the agencies of being little more than pimps for the timber, ranching, mining, and tourism industries:
“Recreational development is a job not of building roads into the lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.”
• The Yoo Years. Bush has put the Constitution and Geneva Conventions through a paper shredder, and the phrase “civil liberties” has been erased from the administration’s playbook. Several years after a visit to Germany in the 1930s, Leopold reflected on the insidious ways fascism grows until it captures even reasonable people in its despotic claws:
“It makes one think again that there must be some cosmic infection of the human mind. ‘It can’t happen here?’ It is happening here.”
• Rove R Us. Political speech is little more than shallow advertising lingo, empty sound bites, xenophobia, Orwellian inanities, guilt by association, fear-mongering, and twisting words like “elitist” and “liberal”:
“How often, though, does any political action portray the real depth of the idea behind it? For political consumption a new thought must always be reduced to a posture or a phrase.”
• The Fix Is In, Go Shopping! Corporate America and its mouthpieces in DC tell us we don't have to change our consumptive ways, that technology will solve the loss of finite resources. The Dust Bowl convinced Leopold that technology is a good tool, but it doesn't provide wisdom. If we abuse the land, he cautioned, Mother Nature will have the final say. We should step down from our pedestals of arrogance:
“Our tools are better than we are, and they grow faster than we do. … If science cannot lead us to wisdom as well as power, it is surely no science at all.”
• Permanent Fiasco. We remain mired in an unjust war for natural resources and empire, orchestrated by lies and sanctioned by hubris - the most ineptly and immorally conceived clusterfuck imaginable. Having lived through two world wars, Leopold saw that when nations operate without a moral compass, the result is death camps, killing machines, atom bombs, and perpetual war:
"Wars are no longer won; the concept of top dog is now a myth; all wars are lost by all who wage them."
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Despite these troubles, Leopold would have much to celebrate today: the passing of important legislation since his death, such as the Endangered Species Act and Wilderness Act; the beginning of Earth Day in 1970; the public visibility conservation efforts receive, to the point Al Gore wins a Nobel Prize and Oscar; developments in hyrbid cars and alternative energy; the reintroduction of wolves; and recycling and other green developments. And, advocate of Jeffersonian politics that he was, Leopold would be proud of the citizens who challenge governments and growth machines, who help change society's values about what really matters and, in so doing, stop boondoggles like dams in the Grand Canyon.
"The direction is clear, and the first step is to throw your weight around on matters of right and wrong in land-use. Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays. That philosophy is dead in human relations, and its funeral in land-relations is overdue."
Still, he'd probably be sad and angry. That we even talk about drilling in ANWR would enrage him; that the U.S. has never ratified Kyoto would embarrass him; that we continue to subsidize mining companies which destroy our mountains and rivers would disgust him; that species extinction continues unbated would sadden him; that the family farmer is nearly done for would upset him; and, most of all, that our nation's president and vice president are oil men who continue to suck at the teat of that industry, governing as if they never left the corporate board room, would sicken him.
“We are remodeling Alhambra with a steam-shovel, and we are proud of our yardage…. A stump [is] our symbol of progress.”
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Here's a final passage that might be called Leopold’s awakening - his description of an event that took place in 1909 when he was 22. After shooting a wolf in the mountains of the Southwest, a routine Forest Service task at the time, Leopold senses that nature is a healthy organism that works best when humans adapt themselves to its rhythms, rather than bending nature to our will:
"We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view."
Sure, Leopold made his share of mistakes and he wasn't without flaws, but on this day I’d rather let them pass. If you haven’t dipped into Sand County or his other essays in a while, pick them up. The words age well, and you sense that if Leopold were around today, given how prolific a writer he was, you'd see him posting here with DK's exceptional eco-diarists (thank you for your important work). If you have the chance, visit Leopold’s “Shack” north of Madison, Wisconsin, where he, his wife Estella, and their five children learned to live on and with the land. It was there, on April 21, 1948, that Aldo rushed to help a neighbor put out a grass fire. He was 61.
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”