To environmentalists throughout the world, this is Aldo Leopold Week, which celebrates the life and work of the author of “A Sand County Almanac.”
According the foreword in my least battered copy of this environmental classic, Robert Finch wrote:
”Leopold was never simply a forest manager or a wildlife ecologist or even a conservationist discussing how to increase tree production or protect certain endangered species. Nor is he a literary stylist mining the landscape of new metaphors.”
Leopold was an artist.
While working for the government, Leopold wrote countless reports and management plans.
As a professor, he no doubt wrote and edited academic papers.
But he was most influential as a creative writer.
Artists communicate.
Leopold painted the natural world with words, and according to Finch, using “the voice of the narrator that comes across strongly: warm, amiable, self-deprecating, encouraging, quietly authoritative” Leopold introduced his “land ethic” and changed the course of environmental stewardship forever.
We need researchers and scientists. We need land stewards, both professional and volunteer.
But we also desperately needs artists: artists of all disciplines to communicate the land ethic, which expands the definition of “community” to include not only humans, but all of the other parts of the Earth, as well as soils, waters, plants and animals — “the land."
Aldo Leopold wrote, “we shall never achieve harmony with the land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations, the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.”
