Plain member

Seventy-five years ago (October 27, 1949), Sand County Almanac (SCA) was published (Oxford University Press). It emerged from a great collection of essays and musings that Aldo Leopold had generated co-incidence with his development and emergence as conservation leader.

It’s a product of a restless mind, a life-long compulsion for writing, and a great love. It was published posthumously, although Leopold knew it was going to print when he died young (age 61), fighting a wildfire on a neighbor’s farm, just upslope a bit from the Wisconsin River floodplain.

I stood there last week. On the very spot. The Leopold Foundation has a modest monument. And I visited “the Shack” again, the re-habilitated chicken coop on a small property down the road where the Leopold family created refugia for themselves, and where Leopold wrote or mused much of what he wrote about in the Sand County Almanac (e.g. the “Good Oak” essay). 

I was brokering an experience for a young scholar, a friend, studying Leopold’s role in the emergence of the Pittman Robertson Act of 1937 – a key vehicle for funding wildlife conservation in the US. It’s familiar territory, bringing younger folks while wearing my professor’s hat, touching a varied legacy, seeking again a refuge of sorts, a node in the historic, disciplinary, and cultural connections that I hold dear. It was a warm October day with fall foliage in full flag, the rank warmth of the fall dormant prairie, and the broad sandy Wisconsin River in late afternoon light.

Leopold produced two books, SCA (1949) and Game Management (1933) – the first textbook on the science of wildlife conservation. Of these two, Game Management is known only among academic specialists and students, though it is a marker for the emergence of wildlife conservation as a university-blessed applied science.

SCA changed the intellectual landscape and helped shape a movement. SCA is why Leopold is famous and why his ideas have endured and continue to exert influence. It’s an informative juxtaposition for my students. Good science is important, but if you want it to change the world, learn to communicate with grace and beauty and punch.

The book didn’t sell much at first but was re-discovered in 1970 with celebration of the first Earth Day and emergence of a new environmental movement. It’s since been called the Bible of the modern environmental movement and volumes of essays, journal articles, and books have been written about it, about Leopold himself, and about their significance. It’s singularly famous for its philosophical punchline, the Land Ethic.

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

I am not a literature or Leopold scholar, or an environmental historian and I found SCA pleasant enough when I encountered it in 1988. But it didn’t move me the way it did for others in my profession. I cannot capture, in a few sentences, a meaningful summary of the scholarship surrounding it. But I read it again, and then again, and then for 30+ years I returned to it for teaching, for inspiration, and for growing recognition of an intellectual homeland for my training, my interests, and my anxieties. 

At some point I realized that it was beautiful. I realized that Leopold loved language and literature and history and ecology and that he would weave them together to touch your heart (and maybe prick your conscience). 

It’s an enigmatic little book. It begins with lovely little essays on a Midwestern seasonal phenology, and then ranges into essays that lyrically let its ecologist-writer reveal himself and then into a savory rustic philosophical discourse with midcentury Midwestern socio-ecological seasonings. Writing during the aftermath of the Depression, the Dustbowl, and two world wars, it arcs subtly, maybe improbably, into a great hopefulness, a clear-eyed calculation that culture needed to change its self-destructive ways, but also that it could change, and possibly that the first inklings of change were occurring – aided by the emerging science of conservation.

In considering the Land Ethic, I spent too much energy trying to infer ecological meanings for “integrity” and “stability” (beauty was self-evident) before recognizing that “community” was the point. In the pre-amble Leopold tell his readers to “…quit thinking about decent land use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right as well as what is economically expedient.” Here Leopold steers us away from a utilitarian view of nature from “man, the conqueror” to man the “biotic citizen” and “plain member” of the “land-community.”  

This was a significant turning point. In SCA, Leopold gently removed humanity from its hubristic Enlightenment apogee and took us down a few pegs to consider our interdependence among a community of other beings. SCA countered the ruthless utilitarianism he trained under in Gifford Pinchot’s school of forestry at Yale and struck a blow against a colonizer mindset that that shaped American history (and still pollutes our politics). Nature (land) was not simply a collection of commodified resources available for exploitation at our every whim. Leopold, the scientist, gave us the permission to hold scientific objectivity and love for nature at the same time.

We know little of Leopold’s faith. His wife, Estella, was a practicing Catholic and its clear from allusions sprinkled through his writings that Leopold was familiar with the Bible. In SCA, he uses Abraham (and by extension, Christianity) as a foil, writing “Abraham knew exactly what the land was for: it was to drip milk and honey into Abraham’s mouth. At the present moment, the assurance with which we regard this assumption is inverse to the degree of our education.” Christianity here held the commodity-view of nature and Leopold was arguing for an evolution towards a community view. It reads as a little mean-spirited, but I would argue that it likely fit the baseline attitudes of American Christianity in the 1940s and even for many in the 2020s. And to be fair, I share his frustration.

One value of SCA is as a secular signpost for a more biblical view of humanity’s relationship to “the creation” (SCA: the land) and a fair critique of Western Christianity (Lynne White Jr. famously made the same point in 1967: Science 155, pp 1203-1207). My view of the state of play in Eco-theological studies is that we’re only recently recognizing the damage we did (and are doing!) from centuries of KJV-reading of Genesis directing humanity to “subdue” and “have dominion over” creation where the original language is closer to “serve” and “protect.” Making the correction, we not only join Leopold, we join Native American wisdom, and likely, other faiths.

When Leopold died, colleague Joe Hickey became the second chair in the department Leopold founded. When Hickey retired, Leopold student Bob McCabe became the third chair. In June, I became the 12^th chair in that lineage, and I often ponder my responsibility to the Leopold legacy. Twelve is the end of a cycle. It’s midnight before the dawn and late December before the new year and I feel transition all around me.

The big questions in conservation have changed and that’s true in a theological sense as well as a cultural and professional sense and I wonder what Leopold’s take would be on local things like Enbridge line 5 and the global catastrophe of climate warming and greenhouse gas emissions and indifference among the rich and powerful. Ending and mitigating climate chaos is humanity’s most important task. I am especially anxious about the upcoming elections.

The question of “What would Leopold do?” is often fraught because it assumes that the thinking we need had been accomplished during Leopold’s time. That’s a mistake. Moreover, the academic and disciplinary legacy isn’t entirely heroic and persistent academic hagiographies of dead white men may communicate that the space isn’t entirely friendly to those who don’t share the privileges that I grew up with. So I hold it gingerly. 

Leopold looked to the future through an ethics lens and imagined, with all audacity, a culture that knew its place in nature through a posture of humility and took responsibility for itself as any honorable member would. Leopold knew the value of introspection and a generosity for the bit players in the biotic drama. He valued and taught the value of citizenship which fits so seamlessly with the importance of community. 

The better question is to emulate the progressive stance Leopold took and ask “How would Leopold think?”

Hat-tip to Leopold biographer and my friend, Cut Miene.
Source and copyright for the Leopold Photo: University of Wisconsin Libraries, Aldo Leopold digital archives