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Sand County: the Essence of Leopold's Thought

By Nina Leopold Bradley

One morning, some time ago, Americans woke up as usual to read their papers. After the news, sports, and scandal sections, they turned to the comics. There, in his "Doonesbury" comic strip, Garry Trudeau made reference to, of all people, John Muir and Aldo Leopold --- a surprising achievement for these two splendid men!

About the same time, a Wisconsin newspaper ran a column for the lovelorn. One ad read: "Middle-aged man, interested in Vivaldi and Aldo Leopold, seeks interested female." I hope he found the right gal. I can imagine my father smiling at this one!

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It seems that the influence of these men has reached new proportions.

I have been asked to comment on Aldo Leopold's legacy. You could not have selected a more prejudiced person for this assignment.

My father's little volume, A Sand County Almanac, was published posthumously, in 1949. It stands as the distilled essence of Leopold's mature thought. As a measure of the success of this volume, it is seldom found in second-hand book stores. Instead it finds its way into bike bags, backpacks and on bedside tables. The demand for this little volume has continued to escalate for fifty years.

Aldo Leopold is well known for his advocacy of a system of wilderness preserves and his role in the founding of The Wilderness Society. Preserving and studying wilderness was important in part so that we might retain the capacity to compare unspoiled land with lands more intensively altered by human economic activity. His ecological rationale for wilderness preservation was scientific, historical, spiritual and recreational. He wrote:

"I am glad that I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?"

I want to share with you our family story another blank spot on the map, but hardly a wilderness. Our Sand County farm, forgotten and left for dead, had been heedlessly ravaged by men who regarded land as commodity to be exploited and abandoned. Here the frontier story had progressed from wilderness, to farm land, to waste land. The sand burs in our socks were effective reminders.

The family years at our Sand County farm were an experience in the slow sensitizing of people to land. It is interesting to hear how my father perceived our family activities as he writes in the Foreword to A Sand County Almanac:

Part I tells what my family sees and does at its week-end refuge from too much modernity: 'the Shack'. On this sand farm in Wisconsin, first worn out and then abandoned by our bigger and better society, we try to rebuild, with shovel and axe, what we are losing elsewhere. It is here that we seek and still find our meat from God.

With the benefit of age, I read with new perspective, a quotation from my father, written many years ago. "There are two things that interest me, the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land." In this very early statement, Leopold captured the essence of his concerns, as all his life he worked to understand the complexity of the land community and his place in that community.

At the Shack, my father's two interests came into play, the relation of our family members to each other and our relation to this piece of land. Blending science, natural history and philos- ophy, these were years of expanding awareness of ecology, of diversity in natural environments, of working to understand the interconnectedness of the natural system.

Here my father became a participant in the drama of the land's inner workings; as he transformed the land, it transformed him. By his own actions and transformation, Aldo Leopold instilled in his children a love and respect for the land community and its ecological functioning.

With the flurry of weekend activity this family of teenage kids had time for adventure and discovery, while working to bring health back to the land. From April to October scarcely a weekend went by that someone did not plant or transplant something --- a mosaic of conifers, hardwoods, and prairie. This was one of the first attempts at ecological restoration, as our family worked to complete the frontier story and bring the forgotten waste land back to health.

Leopold's pioneering contribution to the science of ecological restoration is but one aspect of an enduring legacy.

I quote again from the Foreword:

There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one 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.

In this statement Leopold challenges us to reappraise our value system and ask where does use of land end and abuse of land begin? Do we want to squeeze the land for all it is worth for still more material possessions, or do we want a wider diversity of values which would incorporate harmony between man and land? This challenge remains with us today --- to lean less on corporate exploitation and more on sensitivity to our natural world.

Leopold stressed the need for an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections and convictions that reflect a consciousness of individual responsibility for health of the land --- an ecological conscience. He writes, "A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of the land."

Over a lifetime my father came to realize the full "price" of depleted floras and faunas --- the loss of ecological functions and the loss of wild beauty, wonder, and mystery in the world. He could see firsthand the full extent of the land degradation. He suggested that it was time for science to deal with the earth itself and utilize the information being generated from the emerging discipline --- ecology.

Aldo Leopold worked directly with farmers, hunters, and politicians to erect practical, on-the-ground conservation programs. He led the way in propelling the U.S. conservation   [p. 36]  

movement from garden and shooting clubs to government agencies and legislatures. His ability to communicate to these various groups is expressed through his legacy as a wonderful combination of prophet, professor, civil servant, and lover of the land.

On the Leopold Reserve today, 50 years later, we continue working to bring the frontier story full circle from wilderness, to wasteland, to restored biotic health. Along with restoration activities, keeping phenological records is part of the action.

During the 13 years our family had at the Shack, we recorded daily, weekly, seasonal events --- tracks of animals in the snow, the arrival of migratory geese, the courtship of woodcock, flowering of plants, etc. We learned the true meaning of father's statement, "Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the change of finding order and meaning in these events."

The study of the seasonal events of the natural system is known as phenology. My father writes, "a year to year record of this order, is the record of the rates at which solar energy flows to and through living things . . . the arteries of the earth." Comparing my father's phenological data, taken in the 1930s and 1940s with ours recorded in the '70s, 80s and 90s at the same place, gives us unique opportunity to monitor responses of plants and animals to climate --- to temperature, day length, etc.

Are these family addictions of action and documentation a legacy or simply a genetic trait?

With all my biases and partiality, I suggest that my father's major legacy to future generations is the same as his legacy to his children: to reform our attitudes toward land, to reconsider our natural and cultural heritage, in terms of things natural, wild and free and, finally, to establish a harmonious relationship between humans and the land.