A Sand County Almanac

One of these days I'll write a full review of Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (Outdoor Essays & Reflections), but for now, with Christmas fast approaching, let me just say that even if the text were not a classic (1949), this combination of text and photos by Michael Sewell from Oxford University Press (2001), with Introductory essay by Kenneth Brower, could be carried by the photographs alone. The design and production values are worthy of the subject. This is a must for those who appreciate what Leopold said and who also want some sense of what Leopold saw.

A great photo book for putting under the Christmas tree!

For the Health of the Land

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 Previously Unpublished Essays and Other Writings Edited by J. Baird Callicott and Eric T. Freyfogle.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.

The Virtues of Ignorance

The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (Culture of the Land) (A Series in the new Agrarianism) Edited by Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson. The University Press of Kentucky, 2008.

The question of the book is this: "Since we're billions of times more ignorant than knowledgeable, why not go with our long suit and have an ignorance-based worldview?" In other words, why not try humility in the face of our incurable ignorance rather than hubris-ic bravado. This is a new-old epistemology, as several of the authors point out--at least as old as Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates and the rest, maybe even as old as the Garden of Eden. The question is pondered, chewed like cud, by a "who's who" of thinkers and garden philosophers from a wide variety of disciplines and professions: Wendell Berry, Robert Perry, Richard D. Lamm, Conn Nugent, Raymond H. Dean, Steve Talbott, Anna L. Peterson, Paul G. Heltne, Charles Marsh, Peter G. Brown, Strachan Donnelley, Robert Root-Bernstein, Marlys Hearst Witte, Peter Crown, Michael Bernas, Charles L. Witte, Herb Thompson, Jon Jensen, Joe Marocco, and Craig Holdrege.



In other words, this is a book of collected essays based on a symposium held in June 2004 in Matfield Green, Kansas, and suffers all of the weaknesses such books incur, especially an unevenness of quality, abrupt changes in the level and focus of the discourse, and a tendency toward successive monologues rather than true dialog.

That having been said, the book's subject is timely and vital. As I write, the Republican standard bearer and Republican VP candidate are priming every audience they meet with chants of "drill, baby, drill"--hardly a humble stance toward the consumption of fossil fuels or the dangers of global warming. Palin, the GOP VP candidate, still doubts the science of global warming. This would be fine if her stance were one of humility and reverence for life (all of life, not merely the unborn individual human life) in the face of her ignorance, but instead she insists on exhausting the natural world now and squandering on the present generation what it took nature "geologic time" to build.

It is also ironic that I am posting this review on the eve of the first operation of the Large Hadron Collider. As the New York Times so cleverly opines: Fingers Crossed, Physicists Are Ready for Collider to Roll. Why "fingers crossed"? Because once again we humans are willing to roll the dice with nature in order to increase our knowledge. We love to open Pandora's box again and again, to eat every now and again of the tree of knowledge--to take a chance on blowing up the world for the sake of a little science. (Collider Article 2, Collider Article 3). The problem with science as it is--with the knowledge-based world view we have inherited--writes Peter G. Brown is "the dictum that moral judgments have no place in science." The question is always whether we can, not whether we should. Without moral judgments and without a basis for such morality in our respect for nature, we cannot ever answer whether we should. In the case of the collider, for example, whether dangerous black holes emerge or not (something you cannot know before you smash a few particles), is it moral to spend $8 billion, not counting the toll on natural resources, to create such a monster for the benefit of rarefied science? Is it? On what moral basis did we decide to act in such blatant disregard for a reverence for life?

The authors of this book urge humility, a recognition that "We do not own the world but are simply voyagers on it along with millions of other species--many extinct, many yet to come--with whom we share both heritage and destiny." (Brown)

If we want to avoid a tumbledown fate for our planet, one that equals the tumbledown state of our farms, we would do well to heed their advice.

I highly recommend this very difficult read, for goodness sake.