A Sand County Almanac was a collection of essays Leopold was drafting when he died in 1948. His son finished editing them and published the collection a year later. This particular edition, released in 1970, also includes 8 entries from a separate collection of Leopold's essays, released in the 1950s under the title Round River.
The first 12 essays, totaling about 100 pages in this collection, are a description of different features of a farm Leopold and his family purchased in the 1930s, in a section of Wisconsin known as the Sand Counties. Because the ground is extremely sandy, and generally wasn't considered high-value for agriculture. The essays take different angles and writing approaches. February's centers around the felling of a single aged oak, Leopold describing major events in conservation or biology that took place during the decade of tree growth the saw is currently cutting through.
Meanwhile, July's starts with an early morning walk by Leopold and his dog, and all the things they encounter along the way, then switches to discussing a little patch of Silphium that had survived in the corner of a roadside graveyard until the road department removed the fence and mowed everything, and from there into discussion of relative biotic diversity of his farm versus the campus where he taught and how humans are the only species that can be aware of extinction and maybe that's what elevates us above other creatures.
That train of thought, that Man has this awareness (or maybe capacity for this awareness), and therefore a responsibility to be more thoughtful in how he interacts with the world around them, comes up more further into the book. Usually in terms of how we aren't exercising that responsibility. That the land is seen strictly as something to provide economic value for us, and anything that's value can't be quantified in dollars and cents, is easily dismissed as irrelevant. That everything about how we operate is extractive, and what's more, extractive without understanding how the parts of the system are interrelated.
So we remove all the prairie plants that helped make the rich soil we grow stuff in, then wonder why soil productivity declines such that, even with advances in technology or fertilizers, total yield isn't improved. Especially considering all the soil, and therefore farmable acreage, lost via erosion. That the fledgling conservation agencies of that time keep trying to sell farmers on programs to preserve soil, or preserve plant diversity, but they let the farmers pick and choose which to use. So the farmers only adopt the practices they think will make them money, right now (and usually demand money in exchange for adopting them.)
I can confirm this was still a pretty regular line of approach in wildlife management a decade ago. If you want the farmers to plant some of their field in native grasses, you've got to show them how that'll help their cattle gain weight in the summer, so they make more when they sell them. Of course, they're trying to pay their bills so they don't lose their land, so I'm not really surprised. Maybe you'd like them to think a bit longer term, but that's hardly a failing exclusive to farmers.
And there are definitely passages in the second half of the book where Leopold's tone comes off condescending towards everyone who doesn't see things like him. He's on a bus in Illinois, and he makes a comment that a farmer is more focused on the fertilizer bill in his pocket that the land around him, or that most of the people aren't paying any attention to the plants they're passing, and would probably dismiss those plants as weeds if they did notice, but these prairie plants are the reason why their farms are so good and so on.
Or that it's all well and good the government designated certain lands as parks or preserves, but they need to stop encouraging people to go there by adding roads (which also serve to break up habitat.) He remarks he doesn't need to be able to actually travel to the wilderness in Alaska to appreciate it, so people shouldn't need to go to these other parks, either.
He wants people to respect nature and understand how many different factors go into it and how often removing one thing - a plant, animal, soil - can have unexpected effects, and so we need to appreciate everything beyond what it can do to fatten our wallets. I agree, more education focusing on those interconnections is good, although maybe he's underestimating how complicated organisms and biotic factors can get, and how much a particular person may have to focus on a specific area to gain any understanding of it. As someone whose work was always more in the field side than the lab side, I'm certainly with Leopold on the value of getting out there and making observations. There are limits to what you can do with that, however. Certainly in terms of what you can quantify.
I think it helps people to understand that if they can actually go out and see it. Certainly felt like it helped me, and getting to be outdoors was its own reward. Sometimes, depending on the weather and/or number of ticks. But not everyone owns their own land like Leopold did, where they can just go wander around wherever they like, whenever they like. And not everyone can get jobs that pay them to be outdoors, observing nature or carrying out experiments on timber harvest or tree planting strategies. And frankly, a lot of the jobs of that nature that do exist, don't pay enough or run long enough to be a career.
It seems like Leopold expects everyone who can't get their own bit of nature to explore, to simply take the value of it on faith, sight unseen, rather than risk tarnishing it with their noisy, automobile-fueled vacation.
'Land is the place where corn, gullies, and mortgages grow. Country is the personality of the land, the collective harmony of its soil, life, and weather. Country knows no mortgages, no alphabetical agencies, no tobacco road; it is calmly aloof to these petty exigencies of its alleged owners. That the previous owner of my farm was a bootlegger mattered not one whit to the grouse; they sailed as proudly over the thickets as if they were guests of the king.'
No comments:
Post a Comment