As much as I wish I could write and post my adventures the day after they happen, the reality of life makes that impossible. October ended up being one road trip after another as I roamed over Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, and even made a special trip home to Kansas to welcome my new little nephew to the family. If I’m going to take this blogging thing seriously, then it’s time I finally started catching up!
At the beginning of this month, after the emotional roller coaster that was September, I made the time to visit a small acreage outside of Baraboo, WI to visit the place where one of my top-five-most-influential books was inspired and written by what has to be one of the coolest guys of all time.
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| How could I possibly say 'no' to a rustic road? |
Aldo Leopold was one of those awesome guys that did a lot of questioning and musing on our relationship and attitude toward the land and other living things, and most importantly wrote his thoughts and discoveries down to share. The most famous of these written collections is
A Sand County Almanac, which tracks the goings-on of the wild things residing in the 120 acres Leopold owned and often lived on. On those 120 acres of neglected and abandoned farmland, Leopold and his family rebuilt The Shack and made it livable, planted the pine trees that would later be used to build the
Aldo Leopold Legacy Center, and brought the land back to life. It was here that Aldo developed his concept of a land ethic,
Basically, the land ethic is a moral code requiring its followers to love and respect the land, all land, on which we live. Without the land, quite simply, we cannot survive either culturally or biologically. And while this is kind of an obvious fact, it’s also something that’s easily forgotten in the rush of everyday life, lost in the myriad of other priorities: bills to pay, social expectations to meet, emails to write, blogs to update, etc. I’m certainly no exception, trust me the image of coal mines and oil drills do not pop up in my mind everytime I turn on a light switch or drive across town. In broad terms, we all take the earth for granted, and ol’ Aldo wanted to raise our attention again.
A Sand County Almanac was not my favorite the first time around when I had to read it for a class. But like a song with catchy lyrics, snippets would play through my mind at random before I was forced, in order to preserve my sanity, to look up the parts I half-remembered. And then I was hooked.
So yeah, visiting this place was pretty important to me.
You can take yourself on a self-guided tour down to The Shack and grounds around it, and you’re given a map with 9 different stops. On the map/brochure, they give a ‘suggested reading’ from
A Sand County Almanac, and I was so angry I hadn’t brought my new copy with me to really break it in. It was for the best though as I was racing sundown as it was! I wanted this post to follow the format of that, listing each stop along the way, a Leopold quote, and when I had the inclination, some ramblings of my own.
“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot…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. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.
These wild things, I admit, had little human value until mechanization assured us of a good breakfast, and until science disclosed the drama of where they come from and how they live. The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not.”
So begins the foreword of Aldo Leopold’s
A Sand County Almanac, one of the defining works of modern wildlife management and conservation thought. The first stop was the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center, a super-cool building that just reeked of hope and sustainability. It was here that I picked up the third book on my winter reading list,
Thinking Like a Mountain, and was sent on my way to visit The Shack.
Given the option to drive the ¾ mile to the entrance gate or walk it, I found the choice quite obvious:
A late afternoon stroll down a rustic road that looked like this? Yes, please.
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Stop #1: The Gate
Suggested Reading: Foreword
Should I remind you at this point that this was written in the 1940s? A passage like this could just as easily be found in the financial, political, and environmental activist literature this morning.
Leopold’s conclusions and insights concerning our relationship with our environment (and more importantly, what our relationship with the land should be) are nothing new. He was not the first to relay these sentiments of loving and respecting the ecological systems on which we depend, just look at native philosophies from across the world, read religious texts past and present, any kind of moral code –written or spoken – and you will find similar lines. This does not diminish his influence on the culture and philosophy of the “American Conservationist” because his writings came a time when the collective ‘we’ had forgotten those bits in our own moral code, or the flow of our own cultural development had simply veered off from those before us.
Reminders are good. I believe it does the world some good to be continually be reminded that it is we that belong to the land and depend on it for survival, not the other way around.
In light of the recent economic crises in our country and others, this particular passage struck me as incredibly relevant to our present times, even though it was penned over a half of a century ago. I love the line that our society is “so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy.” I wish I could wax eloquent on the current state of our economy and what should be done about it, but I’ll admit I know very little about our present circumstances beyond the fact I’m not alone in living under the poverty line. Maybe I should be more informed and be more demanding of solutions, but when I can sit on a fallen tree and watch squirrels chase each other around, or see my nephew’s grin when I play “puppies” with him, thoughts of the world’s economic fate are far from my mind. I like to think at those moments, when my bank account is nothing but a number, that I have a proper disdain for material possessions.
Stop #2: The Pines
Suggested Reading: Pines Above the Snow
“Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree – and there will be one.” (Pines Above the Snow, p. 81)
“It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines something more important than woodlot politics, and the news of the wind and weather. 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. Nevertheless, my pines, each with is burden of snow, are standing ramrod-straight, rank up on rank, and in the dusk beyond I sense the presence of hundreds more. At such times I feel a curious transfusion of courage.” (Pines Above the Snow, p. 87)
What is it about the woods that comforts us? I nearly wore out the MKT trail when I lived in Columbia, and up in the Driftless I have more than one spot that I seek out in times of need.
From evolutionary psychology we have the idea of a hyperactive agency detection device (HADD) that’s wired in our brains and causes us to “give agency” to things that are inanimate. It explains why when the wind rustles through the bushes we first assume there’s a predator lurking among the leaves, rather than an invisible movement of air. Perhaps in a less dramatic setting it also is what causes us to connect on such an emotional level with nature. It’s one of those obvious observations that’s hard to collect tangible evidence for, but you can feel it in your being. From nature we gather traits that we admire and respect in each other: patience, fortitude, persistence, and as Leopold found, courage.
Stop #3: The Prairie
Suggested Reading: The Sand Counties (but I liked the following passage from Odyssey better)
"X had marked time in the limestone ledge since the Paleozoic seas covered the land. Time, to an atom locked in a rock, does not pass.
The break came when a bur-oak root nosed down a crack and began prying and sucking. In the flash of a century the rock decayed, and X was pulled out and up into the world of living things. He helped build a flower, which became an acorn, which fattened a deer, which fed an Indian, all in a single year.
From his berth in the Indian's bones, X joined again in chase and flight, feast and famine, hope and fear. He felt these things as changes in the little chemical pushes and pulls that tug timelessly at every atom. When the Indian took his leave of the prairie, X moldered briefly underground, only to embark on a second trip through the bloodstream of the land.
This time is was a rootlet of bluestem that sucked him up and lodged him in a leaf that rode the green billows of the prairie June, sharing the common task of hoarding sunlight..." (Odyssey, p. 104-105)
What can I say? Having spent the first twenty-two years of my life in the heart of prairie territory I will always, always, have a fondness for big bluestem, coneflowers, and blue skies that stretch forever.
Stop #4: The Shack
Suggested Reading: Great Possessions
“One hundred and twenty acres, according to the County Clerk, is the extent of my worldly domain. But the County Clerk is a sleepy fellow, who never looks at his record books before nine o’clock. What they would show at daybreak is the question here at issue.
Books or no books, it is a fact, patent both to my dog and myself, that at daybreak I am the sole owner of all the acres I can walk over. It is not only boundaries that disappear, but also the thought of being bounded. Expanses unknown to deed or map are known to every dawn, and solitude, supposed no longer to exist in my county, extends on every hand as far as the dew can reach.” (Great Possessions, p. 41)
Next to the Shack was a small podium surrounded by wooden benches, where I could only imagine the words of inspiration and wisdom that must have passed here:
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| Best seat in the house. |
At this moment in my little pilgrimage, I finally let myself dwell on the question I had been stuffing down since May: Did I make the right decision in leaving graduate school? Was I right to quit after my Master's?
It was not an easy decision, let me tell you that right now. I made every flow chart, pros and cons list, and alternate option outline I could, ever torn between my restless urges to get back "out there" and my love for CoMO and the people I had come to know. Clearly I chose to venture out into the world again, and for the most part I hadn't looked back, but every once in awhile...
Sitting there next to the Shack, surrounded by beauty on a perfect late afternoon day in October, I could finally say that yes, absolutely yes, my decision to leave academia was good for me. While I might find my way back again at some point down the road, I wouldn't trade that afternoon, or any of the afternoons before it, for anything.
Stop #5: The Parthenon
"The Parthenon" is actually the outhouse, and sadly I have no great picture of this particular structure, nor a relevant quote to go along with it. However, I do have a picture of the Shack
from the Parthenon, complete with an orb right over the Shack, which I'm going to go ahead and assume is Aldo enjoying the late afternoon sunlight.
Stop #6: The River
Suggested Readings: Come High Water, The Green Pasture
“There are degrees and kinds of solitude. An island in a lake has one kind; but lakes have boats, and there is always the chance that one might land to pay you a visit. A peak in the clouds has another kind; but most peaks have trails, and trails have tourists. I know of no solitude so secure as one guarded by a spring flood; nor do the geese, who have seen more kinds and degrees of aloneness than I have.” (Come High Water, p. 25)
“I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all, except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush, and it is the same river who, before I can bring my friends to view his work, erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind’s eye.” (The Green Pasture, p. 51)
Aldo had the Wisconsin River in his backyard. Just wanted to point that out. Lucky.
After growing up in the prairie, I moved to the river(s). While I can't really be considered a "river woman" because I'm no longer a permanent resident nor do I own a boat, you can't live and work along The River without it getting into your blood. Besides, my father, who was raised on its waters, and my mother, who chose it, has it in their blood as well...and I'm fairly certain it was passed onto my sister and I.
Stops #7 and #8: The Old Foundation and the Sand Blow
I'll be straight with you guys. I didn't spend a lot of time contemplating at either of these spots. I know, I know, it's terrible and I should've given equal time to each marker. But I didn't. The sun was sinking fast and the last stop on the tour was far more exciting to me. A poignant chapter in
A Sand County Almanac describes the felling of a large oak tree on the Leopold's property, with time being traced backwards as the blade of a saw bites into the wood. Every so often, the chief sawyer (the brochure tells me it was actually Aldo's wife,Estella, who was the chief sawyer) cries for rest before continuing to saw through the next chunk of history.
Stop #9: The Good Oak
Suggested Reading: Good Oak
"...Only one acorn in a thousand ever grew large enough to fight rabbits; the rest were drowned at birth in the prairie sea.
It is a warming thought that this one wasn't, and thus lived to garner eighty years of June sun. It is this sunlight that is now being released, through the intervention of my axe and saw, to warm my shack and my spirit through eighty gusts of blizzard. And with each gust a wisp of smoke from my chimney bears witness, to whomsoever it may concern, that the sun did not shine in vain." (Good Oak, p. 7)
I’ve seen fungi fight their way through hard-packed trails, fish thriving in a polluted river, and saplings survive where all instincts say they shouldn’t have even taken root. This tells me the planet will survive with or without us. Those apocalyptic scenarios of a scorched sky, lifeless oceans, toxic sludge engulfing whole continents? I don’t think human life would survive long enough to destroy the earth that completely. I think deep down, we all know we act green to ‘save the planet’ because we know it’s really us that will need saving - we know we have to save the planet, the land, to save ourselves.
Here’s the disheartening part. Aldo wrote all of this good stuff over a half a century ago. I’m sad that most of these passages are just as relevant and meaningful now as they were back then, because that means very little has changed. We learn about the land ethic in college courses, some of us may have even been tested on it, but it remains something nearly intangible. Ghost-like it flits about in our society, touching on a news story here, a small change in policy there. The truth of the matter is, something still isn’t clicking. Leopold identified what we were lacking, and even gave eloquent reasons for why we lack it, but conservationists and other wild enthusiasts are still groping for a solution.
Articles, research, outreach the pace is aggravatingly slow and subject to chance and whims of "the public." If you let it, discouragement at the inability to change the way we perceive nature can send you into the depths of depression. But it shouldn’t, because good is happening all around. It’s just not happening all at once or on the scale you expect.
It's in the grass roots movements, local communities deciding amongst themselves to change their own way of thinking and living with their physical world. You can drive through hectares of corporately owned cornfields and into a small town that has a reforestation project in their park, and a café that boasts of local organic fare. And then the next small town down the road has community gardens double the size of the community itself. Fungi fighting through the hard-packed trail and saplings in the barren roadside.
My job for the past six months has been both naturalist and interpreter, which is a common position in nature centers, and national and state parks and forests. What interpreters do is try and help people form connections to a particular resource, be it a prehistoric mound, a grove of aspens, a mountain, a geyser, a river, or the land itself. We’re essentially a physical and metaphysical guide, leading people into an unknown environment and introducing them to it, telling them a bit about it, and forcing a memory. That memory is what they leave with and tell others about. If you’re lucky, and I mean
really lucky, that memory will affect them to the point of altering their daily behavior towards the world around them.
There is an essential step that’s missing, or overlooked, and it’s here that I’ll veer slightly away from interpretive theory and into anthropology (forgive me, I just can’t help it). The process outlined above is first and foremost a social interaction between humans. The environment is there, ever present around us, but visitors seek information they can only obtain from other humans. A waterfall can only tell our senses that it is a waterfall, we need human words, human history, and human emotions to make it anything more.
We humans have survived and proliferated on a scale unprecedented by any other species. We are on every continent. We are everywhere. We owe this to our set of adaptations developed over millennia. The most important of those adaptations is our social behavior. We have reached a point where we depend on others, who may be familiar or unfamiliar, to live and raise offspring. Our behavior can be traced to that sociality and environmental behavior is no different, and is subject to the same shaping forces as any other behavior.
Where did our love of nature come from? All conservationists I have ever conversed with can be almost poetic on their childhood memories of being outside, from fishing trips to watching meteor showers – all of which required some level of involvement or encouragement from someone else.
And those someones are people we know and trust: relatives, neighbors, friends, colleagues. Humans.
When you meet someone new, you gather information about them. Without realizing it, you are recording body language, how they talk, what they talk about, how much they engage themselves in conversation. It’s much easier to acquire this information in person, as opposed to see a person on TV. And you don't need me to tell you that we listen to people we trust. But I'll tell you anyways:
Here is the hypothetical situation I’ve presented to others. Imagine a rural community, people are already connected to the land in a certain way and many actually own or lease land to do with as they see fit. The heads of household are all at the local cantina one night, and in this group there are the older and wiser farmers and laborers to whom the younger generation often goes to for advice and approval and sometimes loans. The TV is up, because a leading expert is discussing the merits of a CRP program, all the benefits to the land and people. The expert is intelligent, well-spoken, engaging, and passionate and presents an impressive case. The story results in a few comments from the group, but the game is switched on, and any beginnings of conversation is dropped. That is until the next commercial break, and one of the older wiser workers quietly comments he has signed up 500 of his acres on a CRP program. Interest is rekindled, and the old worker is slowly asked questions as to why, how, what for, and what is he getting for it. I say slowly because a bar in a small town is not a lecture hall or a debate, it is a place of relaxation. Who is the “public” listening to? Not the big shots on TV. They’re listening to the café owners, to the bartenders, to their neighbors, to the ones they’ve known for years. They listen to the ones they have connections to and trust.
My point is, we listen to everyone. But we tend to act on what we’ve heard only when it comes from someone we have information about, someone we trust. In interpretation, and I think conservation science and outreach, we must first connect our audience to
us.
It is similar in anthropological fieldwork, at least in the realm of cultural anthro. Our fieldwork consists of convincing people to let us interview them, to invade their lives and demand personal information and thoughts. This is hard. You have to work at it, you have to explain yourself over and over, you have to make yourself appear less threatening. Essentially, you have to make friends first or your research and ideas aren’t going anywhere.
I think if we are to going to convince others to change the way they think and connect with their physical environment, then we have to first rethink the way we connect with each other. Keep up with the research or whatever your passion is, but don't forget to connect with your fellow humans every once in awhile.
Let us not let the sun shine in vain.
