Review of: Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac.
Not really a stranger to the tame wilderness of the Midwest, having been a Boy Scout when young and an avid camper since, my knowledge of the value of nature had been limited nonetheless. In 2002, I began hiking, section by section, the Superior Hiking Trail that follows the north shore of Lake Superior from Two Harbors, MN to the Grand Marais, and then heads north through away from the Lake.. When not anxious about seeing an animal around the tree’d-hill that left the bear print, usually my backpacking and day hiking trips become endurance challenges for this out of shape backpacker.
Thus challenged, I keep my focus ground-ward, trying not to trip over or slip on a wet rock. Four years, 15 long trips on foot later, my old ignorance of the sights and sounds around me stemmed more from exhaustion than apathy. Two years ago, doing miles number 44 to number 55, I had begun to read A Sand County Almanac by the practical father of modern conservationism, Aldo Leopold.
Half-way read when we entered the trail near Beaver Bay one Sunday morning, I looked at the woods in the terms which a lady at the coffee shop had used when she noticed I was reading the book: “things have intrinsic value.” Nature is worth more to people than what it gives to us for material need or comfort. Ascending the first corduroy paved, slimy, slippery hill of the trail, I looked around. Almost magically I realized what a great deed it is “to walk in the woods”--the argument my friend used to convince me to do this 230 mile adventure.
Leopold was born in Iowa in 1887. He met his end in a neighbor’s brush fire in 1948, dying to protect the land which had enough value for him to risk his life. In the intervening years, Leopold invented wild game management and instructed at the University of Wisconsin, where a chair position in conservationism was invented for him. The book, A Sand County Almanac, was published from notebooks he kept in Wisconsin on his love of land and his living organisms, the symbiotic organisms revolving and recycling through the food chain. In this very important book with “intrinsic value,” Leopold helps readers understand the self-sustaining process of nature, and how humans affect it, for good or ill.
The 1966 edition I read to review this work actually contained other reflections on various regions. They all purport the thesis that human development has upset the balance of predator and prey among plants and animals, and that humankind has a moral obligation to take redeeming action to save what is left before it changes forever. Leopold’s convincing, implied argument, using examples of lesser species, is that people are entwined with the natural surroundings. Destroying that will destroy ourselves.
Remarkably, Leopold made these visionary assertions almost sixty years ago, long before the reality of resource depletion and life-threatening pollution were barely theories, except to him. Describing the futile bureaucratic attempts to institutionalize such things as erosion prevention or native wildlife protection (not ironically, Leopold was an avid hunter), Leopold said such programs failed to work. The bureaucracy tried to encourage and force reluctant people to conserve their environment based on an appeal to an individual’s dollars and sense. Not only did the bureaucrats enforce counter-productive programs (nearly exterminating wolves, then needing a program to prune the deer population), but people would always find more material comfort in exploiting nature, which in the process destroys the environment.
To me, as a free-market, natural rights libertarian, a government imposed monopoly on environmental policy would fail to produce desired results. The test of modern conservationism seems to hold a further point made by Leopold: when people think that someone else should be responsible—be it a neighbor, a multi-national corporation, or a government—not enough people will care to take action to save nature on their own, or even spend time worrying about it. No government, except perhaps a nature-friendly totalitarian one using violent coercion, can get individuals to protect nature or conserve it. Nothing can force people to enjoy it for its “intrinsic value.”
Even in the age of the post-modern economies, Adam Smith might be relevant, not in economic terms, but morally. Why Adam Smith, the great 18th Century political economist who founded the theory of free-market economics? Smith applies because the soul needs to be involved in natural preservation and management, which is how Leopold concluded his last essay in the 1966 version. Leopold appeals to the self-interest of present and future generations of naturalists. Conservation can happen only at the grass roots-level, with personal responsibility and a division of labor. Enough people have to want to do it bad enough to have a big enough impact. Centralized, one-sized solutions ignore local or regional circumstances might help in one area but damage all the others. The effort to conserve nature and save the planet is in the self-interest of all those who are most affected by it: where they live.
This mythical modern conservationist, with a caring soul that understands and sees nature for its “intrinsic value,” has to want the Creator’s gift of life to continue where it still exists and redeem the life where it has been lost. The “person” must see it as enlightened self-interest, as a means of self-preservation to become a steward of nature. We can only come to this realization through personal, unselfish enlightenment. We must accept these lessons of true value freely, without coercion or guilt, for the lessons to be applied in a truly lasting effort to save God’s gift of Creation on Earth.