Leopold, Aldo. For the Health of the Land. Previously Unpublished Essays and Other Writings Edited by J. Baird Callicott and Eric T. Freyfogle.
Aldo Leopold was most famously the author of A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (1949)--and rightly so. There--on the sandy Wisconsin acres that he called his own--the naturalist, activist conservationist, progressive preservationist invited the world to walk with him, letting eyes, ears, and mind traverse the land as the earth traced its annual orbit. The essays gathered here are clearly akin to those and speak with the same authorial voice.
What amused and satisfied me most was Leopold's definition of a farmer: "anyone 'who determines the plants and animals with which he lives'" (p. 10, Introduction). By that definition, happily, even I, the hapless Tumbledown Farmer, am a real farmer. So are we all. Thus, according to Leopold, you and I have a stake in and responsibility for conservation. The editors of this collection have arranged it to demonstrate a trajectory and progression in Leopold's thought toward this very conclusion. Leopold moves from advice to farmers about how to grow a "wild crop of quail, pheasants, and other farm game" to a concern with improving the aesthetic appearance of farms. In other words, the progression is from utilitarian to artistic and beautiful. Leopold's thought moves from private ownership and economic utility to artistry and "useless" beauty. Leopold's thought moves from private ownership to corporate (community) responsibility and from the preservation of diversity (which, in today's context, seems eerily prescient) by conserving all of the individual species now available (e.g., in the essay entitled "What is a Weed?") to the integrity of the whole, or what Leopold calls the land-health ethic. But of course that is the point. Truth is beauty--and when you are talking about the natural world, the whole is worth more than merely the sum of its parts. And it takes concern for the whole--not just for stopping runoff and erosion, or for economic profit, or saving a particular species.
Leopold almost makes me imagine that it will be possible in our little suburban addition to re-introduce quail. If every "farmer" in the addition were to let pasture grow at the margins and in the collective easements that connect each property to the others--and if we worked together to add cover (there is, after all, a row of white pines on the edge of my property), to constrain feral cats, to feed in winter. Just imagine the "wildlife refuge" this little suburban enclave might support.
Maybe one day we'll join Leopold in writing an almanac of the suburban housing addition.
