I am tempted to add to the title: "....now get back to work!"
Today is Aldo Leopold's 125th birthday. Leopold is highly regarded as one of the world's pre-eminent voices of conservation and environmental stewardship. His classic book A Sand County Almanac is required reading for all of us who care about the land and human communities and economies as part of the land. As a scientist, writer, teacher, advocate, and visionary, Leopold contributed mightily to the conservation movement, infusing it with insights from the then-young science of ecology. In so doing, he helped lay the foundation for the later environmental movement, and for the more recent wave of sustainability thinking and action. His work continues to be a rich source of inspiration for those at work in wildlife conservation, the local food movement and sustainable agriculture, ecological restoration, ecological economics, community-based conservation, and other still-emerging fields.
Although Leopold's life experience took him far afield from his native Midwest -- he was born in the Mississippi River town of Burlington, Iowa -- he is most closely identified with Wisconsin, where he spent the second half of his career. At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he became the first professor of wildlife management, and helped to start the university's renowned arboretum, birthplace of the science and practice of restoration ecology. His students went on to become leaders in conservation science and education themselves, shaping generations of future leaders in the field.
Over this last tumultuous year in Wisconsin politics and government, many of us have reflected a lot on the assault on Wisconsin's progressive traditions. That tradition importantly includes a bi-partisan commitment, over the generations, to care of our soils, waters, Great Lakes, forests, wildlife -- and a concern for the human communities that depend on the land, and for the future generations whose lives and livelihoods will depend on it as well. However, the leadership in environmental stewardship that the state has long claimed has been sullied in recent years, and most especially by the assault taking place under Scott Walker's regime.
The other day NoMoreLies posted an excellent diary that provided a thorough overview of the current situation. Among the affronts that we are facing right now is a ridiculous piece of legislation, written in secret and in collusion with the mining industry, to gut the public permitting process and weaken environmental standards for a proposed iron mine in northern Wisconsin's Penokee Range. Today, on Aldo's birthday, there will be a hearing in the northern town of Hurley, WI. It is a difficult issue. The region is spectacularly beautiful, but economically challenged, especially during this great recession. Of course, the mining interests are using this to promote their plans, avoiding (once again) the larger question of what will promote a healthier, more durable, more dependable economy and way of life in our northern communities. The mining company representatives will be at the hearing today, no doubt. But I expect there will also be a great showing of conservationists, sportsmen, local business people, members of the Bad River and Red Cliff Ojibwe bands, and others who take the longer view, and see another way to thrive in the north country.
Those are just the kinds of questions that Leopold strove to put in front of people. "The oldest task in human history," he once wrote "is how to live on a piece of land without spoiling it." Understanding the importance of that "task," Leopold strove to define a new philosophy of conservation -- what he finally came to call the land ethic.
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 (perhaps in order that there may be a place to compete for).
The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
This sounds simple: do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter down river. Certainly not the waters, which we assume have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off sewage. Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate whole communities without batting an eye. Certainly not the animals, of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species. A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these ‘resources,’ but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state.
In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.
That message is as relevant today as it was in 1949 when it was first published. And it is relevant not only in the remote backcountry. It is pertinent everywhere. In our working forests, rangelands, and farmlands. In the sprawling suburbs that we must somehow make sustainable. In the cities that we must reinhabit and renew. In sustaining the global atmospheric and oceanic commons. Leopold understood the land ethic not as one individual's expression, but as a collective effort. "Nothing so important as an ethic is ever written. It evolves in the minds of a thinking community." And so the idea continues to evolve, in communities everywhere that care about their long-term economic and environmental viability.
Leopold is always his own best spokesperson, so here are a few more points to ponder:
Civilization has so cluttered [the] elemental man-earth relation with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.
If science cannot lead us to wisdom as well as power, it is surely no science at all.
Even the thinking citizen is too apt to assume that his only power as a conservationist lies in his vote. Such as assumption is wrong. At least an equal power lies in his daily thought, speech, and action, and especially in his habits as a buyer and user of wood. I admit that the effective exercise of his power as a purchaser and user of forest products depends on his being well posted. But most problems of good citizenship in these days seem to resolve themselves into just that. Good citizenship is the only effective patriotism, and patriotism requires less and less of making the eagle scream, but more and more of making him think.
Conservation, viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.
If we grant the premise that an ecological conscience is possible and needed, then its first tenet must be this: economic provocation is no longer a satisfactory excuse for unsocial land-use, (or, to use somewhat stronger words, for ecological atrocities). This, however, is a negative statement. I would rather assert positively that decent land-use should be accorded social rewards proportionate to its social importance.
Conservation... is keeping the resource in working order, as well as preventing over-use. Resources may get out of order before they are exhausted, sometimes while they are still abundant. Conservation, therefore, is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence or caution.
I am trying to teach you that this alphabet of "natural objects" (soils and rivers, birds and beasts) spells out a story, which he who runs may read -- if he knows how. Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you.
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.
Happy birthday, Aldo Leopold. Now get back to work!