March 2007, The Country Today

Learning a Love of the Land: Aldo Leopold’s Legacy

By Dena Wortzel

Following in the footsteps of John Muir, about whom I wrote last month, is another icon of the conservation movement who spent a significant portion of his life in Wisconsin. Aldo Leopold is best known for his collection of essays, A Sand County Almanac—a meditation upon humanity and the natural world that draws deeply upon his family’s experience restoring the land on a run-down farm near Baraboo. 

In his forward to the book, written in 1948, Leopold famously states that, “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.  There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture. That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.” 

In 1924, when Leopold took a post at the University of Wisconsin as chair of the state’s and the nation’s first game management program, to think about conservation and Wisconsin’s landscape by definition meant to think about farming. His 1939 essay, The Farmer as a Conservationist, reveals Leopold as a philosopher and student both of the natural world and human nature. Always concerned about how to change destructive patterns of land use to more harmonious ones, Leopold asserts that it is only when farmers’ skill and curiosity about the workings of nature are awakened that conservation can succeed. “Subsidies and propaganda may evoke a farmer’s acquiescence, but only enthusiasm and affection will evoke his skill.”

So where is this love of the land learned, that is a prerequisite to skillfully and ethically working with it? Despite being a teacher himself, Leopold suggests that it is only when this love is first learned at home, “under the farmer’s doorstep,” that the more formal teaching of conservation can take root. Subsidies and education simply aren’t enough, he says, unless there first is personal experience that awakens affection for the land and thus the desire to work it skillfully.

Even when that love is awakened, however, there are other obstacles to harmony between the land and its human inhabitants. One that Leopold singles out is “our self-imposed doctrine of ruthless utilitarianism.” An example he gives of the effects of utilitarian thinking is the disappearance of farm ponds—places for fishing and Sunday picnics, a home to birds and water lilies. Back when the land that became Wisconsin was first surveyed, there were natural ponds everywhere. By the time Leopold was writing, almost all had been drained so that the land could be put to more “productive” use. What Leopold mourns about this loss, and the thinking behind it, is not just the effect on the wildlife that enjoyed the ponds, but its effect on the quality of life for the farm families who drained them. “Can any reasonable man claim that economics prevents us from getting a life, as well as a livelihood, from our acres?” he asks. 

We can thus hear Leopold arguing quite strenuously that the possibilities for a full life on the farm are determined not just by economics, but by what we see around us, what we value, and what we make of the land. Coming at this from a different angle, he takes quite a bit of time to describe a bush called the bog-birch, which he says is “mousy, unobtrusive, inconspicuous, uninteresting.” So what’s the big deal about this bush? It is part of the life cycle of a half-dozen plants and animals, such as grouse, rabbits, and ladyslippers, who do more than the bog-birch to attract our attention. Leopold’s point, in describing the bog-birch, is that there are hundreds of species on any farm and therefore there is “drama in every bush, if you can see it.” Observing and participating in that drama was what Leopold, his family, and students past and present have found so meaningful—if, perhaps, economically unquantifiable.

Nevertheless, economics will always have its say—and it’s no small one. Luckily, how we interpret and respond to economic realities is something about which we still have a choice. I hope that the increasing numbers of new ponds dotting Wisconsin are a positive sign for families seeking to “get a life” and a livelihood on the farm. Even more important, I hope they mean that Leopold’s vision of conservation as harmony between people and the land is one that increasing describes families’ and communities’ dreams for these places that we love.

Dena Wortzel is co-director of the Wisconsin Humanities Council and makes her home on Birch Run Farm in Iowa County. 608-265-5593, dwortzel@wisc.edu.