1500 words essay ---lzy

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Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) is considered the father of wildlife

ecology. He was a renowned scientist and scholar, exceptional

teacher, philosopher, and gifted writer. It is for his book, A

Sand County Almanac, that Leopold is best known by millions

of people around the globe. The Almanac, often acclaimed as

the century's literary landmark in conservation, melds

exceptional poetic prose with keen observations of the natural

world. The Almanac reflects an evolution of a lifetime of love,

observation, and thought. It led to a philosophy that has guided

many to discovering what it means to live in harmony with the

land and with one another.

The roots of Leopold's concept of a "land ethic" can be traced

to his birthplace on the bluffs of the Mississippi River near

Burlington, Iowa. As a youngster, he developed a zealous

appreciation and interest in the natural world, spending

countless hours on adventures in the woods, prairies, and river

backwaters of a then relatively wild Iowa. This early

attachment to the natural world, coupled with an uncommon

skill for both observation and writing, lead him to pursue a

degree in forestry at Yale.

After Yale, Leopold joined the U.S. Forest Service and was

assigned to the Arizona Territories. During his tenure, he

began to see the land as a living organism and develop the

concept of community. This concept became the foundation

upon which he became conservation's most influential

advocate. In 1924, he accepted a transfer to the U.S. Forest

Products Laboratory in Madison where he served as associate

director, and began teaching at Wisconsin in 1928.

Often credited as the founding father of wildlife ecology,

Leopold's cornerstone book Game Management (1933) defined

the fundamental skills and techniques for managing and

restoring wildlife populations. This landmark work created a

new science that intertwined forestry, agriculture, biology,

zoology, ecology, education and communication. Soon after its

publication, the University of Wisconsin created a new

department, the Department of Game Management, and

appointed Leopold as its first chair.

Leopold's unique gift for communicating scientific concepts

was only equal to his fervor for putting theories into practice.

In 1935, the Leopold family purchased a worn-out farm near

Baraboo, in an area known as the sand counties. It is here

Leopold put into action his beliefs that the same tools people

used to disrupt the landscape could also be used to rebuild it.

An old chicken coop, fondly known as the Shack, served as a

haven and land laboratory for the Leopold family, friends, and

graduate students. And it was here Leopold visualized many of

the essays of what was to become his most influential work, A

Sand County Almanac.

Adapted from http://www.naturenet.com/alnc/aldo.html

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From A Sand County Almanac (1949)

Aldo Leopold

February – Good Oak

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a

farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast

comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes

from a furnace.

To avoid the first danger, one should plant a

garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse

the issue.

To avoid the second, he should lay a split of

good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no

furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February

blizzard tosses the trees outside. If one has cut, split,

hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind

work the while, he will remember much about where

the heat comes from, and with a wealth of detail

denied to those who spend the weekend in town

astride a radiator.

* * * * * -1- * * * *

The particular oak now aglow on my andirons

grew on the bank of the old emigrant road where it

climbs on the sandhill. The stump, which I measured

upon felling the tree, has a diameter of 30 inches. It

shows 80 growth rings, hence the seedling from which

it originated must have laid its first ring of wood in

1865, at the end of the Civil War. But I know from

the history of present seedlings that no oak grows

above the reach of rabbits without a decade or more of

getting girdled each winter, and re-sprouting during

the following summer. Indeed, it is all too clear that

every surviving oak is the product either of rabbit

negligence or of rabbit scarcity. Some day some

patient botanist will draw a frequency curve of oak

birth years, and show that the curve humps every ten

years, each hump originating from a low in the ten

year rabbit cycle. (A fauna and flora, by this very

process of perpetual battle within and among species,

achieve collective immortality.)

It is likely, then, that a low in rabbits occurred

in the middle „sixties, when my oak began to lay on

annual rings, but that the acorn that produced it fell

during the preceding decade, when the covered

wagons were still passing over my road into the Great

Northwest. It may have been the wash and wear of

the emigrant traffic that bared this road bank, and thus

enabled this particular acorn to spread its first leaves

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to the sun. Only one acorn in a thousand ever grew

large enough to fight rabbits, the rest were drowned at

birth in the prairie sea.

It is the warming thought that this one wasn‟t,

and thus lived to garner eighty years of June sun. It is

this sunlight that is now being released, through the

intervention of my axe, and saw, to warm my shack

and my spirit through eighty gusts of blizzard. And

with each gust a wisp of smoke from my chimney

bears witness to whomever it may concern, that the

sun did not shine in vain.

My dog does not care where heat comes from,

but he cared ardently that it come and soon. Indeed

he considers by ability to make it come as something

magical, for when I rise in the cold black pre-dawn

and kneel shivering by the hearth making a fire, he

pushes himself blandly between me and the kindling

splits I have laid on the ashes, and I must touch a

match to them by poking it between his legs. Such

faith, I suppose, is the kind that moves mountains.

It was a bolt of lightning that put an end to the

woodmaking of this particular oak. We were all

awakened one night in July, by the thunderous crash;

we realized that the bolt must have hit near by, but,

since it had not hit us, we all went back to sleep. Man

brings all things to the test of himself, and this is

notably true of lightning.

Next morning, as we strolled oven the sandhill

rejoicing with the cone-flowers and the prairie clovers

over their fresh accession of rain, we came upon a

great slab of bark freshly torn from the trunk of the

roadside oak. The trunk showed a long spiral scar of

barkless sapwood, a foot wide and not yet yellowed

by the sun. By the next day the leaves had wilted and

we knew that the lightning had bequeathed to us three

cords of prospective fuel wood.

We mourned the loss of the old tree, but knew

that a dozen of its progeny standing straight and

stalwart on the sands had already taken over its job of

woodmaking.

We let the dead veteran season for a year in the

sun it could no longer use, and then on a crisp

winter‟s day we laid a newly filed saw to its bastioned

base. Fragrant little chips of history spewed from the

saw cut and accumulated on the snow before each

kneeling sawyer. We sensed that these two piles of

sawdust were something more than wood; that they

were the integrated transect of a century; that our saw

was biting its way, stroke by stroke, decade by

decade, into the chronology of a lifetime, written in

concentric annual rings of good oak.

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* * * * * -2- * * *

It took only a dozen pulls of the saw to transect

the few years of our ownership, during which we had

learned to love and cherish this farm. Abruptly we

began to cut the years of our predecessor, the

bootlegger, who hated this farm, skimmed it of its

residual fertility, burned its farmhouse, threw it back

into the lap of the County ( with delinquent taxes to

boot), and then disappeared among the landless

anonymities of the Great Depression. Yet the oak had

laid down good wood for him; his sawdust was as

fragrant, as sound, and as pink as out own. An oak is

no respecter of persons.

The reign of the bootlegger ended sometime

during the dust-bowl droughts of 1936, 1934, 1933,

and 1930. Oak smoke from his still and peat from

burning marshlands must have clouded the sun in

those years, and alphabetical conservation was abroad

in the land, but the sawdust shows no change.

Rest! cries the chief sawyer, and we pause for

breath.

* * -3- * *

Now our saw bites into the 1920‟s the

Babbittian decade when everything grew bigger and

better in heedlessness and arrogance-until1929, when

stock markets crumpled. It the oak heard them fall, its

wood gives no sigh. Nr did it heed the Legislatures

several protestations of love for tree; a National Forest

and a forest-crop law in 1927, a great refuge on the

Upper Mississippi bottomlands in 1924, and a new

forest policy in 1921. Neither did it notice the demise

of the state‟s last marten in 1925, nor the arrival of its

first starling in 1923.

In March 1922, the „Big Sleet‟ tore the

neighboring elms limb from limb, but there is no sign

of damage to our tree. What is a ton or ice, more or

less, to a good oak?

Rest! cries the chief sawyer, and we pause for

breath.

* -4- * *

Now the saw bites into 1910-1920, the

decade of the drainage dream, when steam shovels

sucked dry the marshes of central Wisconsin to make

farms, and made ash-heaps instead. Our marsh

escaped, not because of any caution or forbearance

among engineers, but because the river floods it each

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April, and did so with a vengeance-perhaps a

defensive vengeance-in the years 1913-16. The oak

laid on wood just the same, even in 1915, when the

Supreme Court abolished the state forests and

Governor Phillip pontificated that „state forestry is not

a good business proposition.‟ (It did not occur to the

Governor that there might be more than one definition

of what is good, and even of what is business. It did

not occur to him that while the courts were writing

one definition of goodness in the law books, fires

were writing quite another one on the face of the land.

Perhaps, to be a governor, one must be free from

doubt on such matters.)

While forestry receded during this decade,

game conservation advanced. In 1916 pheasants

became successfully established in Waukesha County;

in 1915 a federal law prohibited spring shooting; in

1913 a state game farm was started; in 1912 a „buck

law‟ protecting female deer; in 1911 an epidemic of

refuges spread over the state. “Refuge” became a holy

word, but the oak took no heed.

Rest! cries the chief sawyer, and we pause for

breath.

* -5- *

Now we cut 1910, when a great university

president published a book on conservation, a great

sawfly epidemic killed millions of tamaracks, a great

drought burned the pineries, and a great dredge

drained Horicon Marsh.

We cut 1909, when smelt were first planted in

the Great Lakes, and when a wet summer induced the

Legislature to cut the forest-fore appropriations.

We cut 1908, a dry year when the forests

burned fiercely, and Wisconsin parted with its last

cougar.

We cut 1907, when a wandering lynx, looking

in the wrong direction for the promised land, ended

his career among the farms of Dane County.

We cut 1906, when the first state forester took

office, and fires burned 17,000 acres in these sand

counties; we cut 1905 when a great flight of

goshawks came out of the North and ate up the local

grouse (they no doubt perched in this tree to eat some

of mine). We cut 1902-3, a winter of bitter cold;

which brought the most intense drought of record

(rainfall only 17 inches); 1900, a centennial year of

hope, of prayer, and the usually annual ring of oak.

Rest! cries the chief sawyer, and we pause for

breath.

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* * -6- * *

Now our saw bites into the 1890‟s, called gay

by those whose eyes turn cityward rather than

landward. We cut 1899, when the last passenger

pigeon collided with a charge of shot near Babcock,

two counties to the north; we cut 1898 when a dry

fall, followed by a snowless winter, froze the soil even

feet deep and killed the apple trees; 1897, another

drought year, when another forestry commission came

into being; 1896, when 25,000 prairie chickens were

shipped to market from the village of Spooner along;

1895, another year of fires; 1894, another drought

year; and 1893, the year of „The Bluebird Storm,‟

when a March blizzard reduced the migrating

bluebirds to near-zero.(The first bluebirds always

alighted in this oak, but in the middle „nineties it must

have gone without.) We cit 1892, another year of

fires; 1891, a low in the grouse cycle, and 1890, the

year of the Babcock Milk Tester, which enabled

Governor Heil to boast, half a century later, that

Wisconsin is America‟s Dairyland. The motor

licenses which not parade that boast were not

foreseen, even by Professor Babcock.

It was likewise in 1890 that the largest pine

rafts in history slipped down the Wisconsin River in

full view of my oak, to build an empire of red barns

for the cows of the prairie states. Thus it is that good

pine now stands between the cow and the blizzard,

just as the good oak stands between the blizzard and

me.

Rest! cries the chief sawyer, and we pause for

breath.

* * -7- * *

Now our saw bites into the 1880‟s; into 1889, a

drought year, in which Arbor day was first

proclaimed; into 1887, when Wisconsin appointed its

first game wardens; into 1886, when the College of

Agriculture held its first short course for farmers; into

1885, preceded by a winter „of unprecedented length

and severity‟; into 1883, when Dean W.H. Henry

reported that the spring flowers at Madison bloomed

13 days later than average; into 1882, the year Lake

Mendota opened a month late following the historic

„Big Snow‟ and bitter cold of 1881-2.

It was likewise in 1881, that the

Wisconsin Agricultural Society debated the question,

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„How do you account for the second growth of black

oak timber that has sprung up allover the country in

the last thirty years?‟ My oak was one of these. One

debater claimed that spontaneous generation, another

claimed regurgitation of acorns by southbound

pigeons.

Rest! Cries the chief sawyer, and we pause for

breath.

* * -8- * *

Now our saw bites into the 1970‟s, the

decade of Wisconsin‟s carousal in wheat. Monday

morning came in 1879, when cinch bugs, grubs, rust,

and soil exhaustion finally convinced Wisconsin

farmers that they could not compete with the virgin

prairies further west in the game of wheating land to

death. I suspect that this farm played its share in the

game, and that the sand blow just north of my oak had

its origin in this over-wheating.

This same year of 1879 saw the first planting of

carp in Wisconsin, and also the first arrival of

quackgrass as a stowaway from Europe. On 27

October 1879, six migrating prairie chicken perched

on the rooftree of the German Methodist Church in

Madison , and took a look at the growing city. On 8

November the markets of Madison were reported to

be glutted with ducks at 10 cents each.

In 1878 a deer hunter from Sauk Rapids

remarked prophetically, “The hunters promise to

outnumber the deer.”

On 10 September 1877, two brothers shooting

Muskego Lake, bagged 210 blue-winged teal in one

day.

In 1876 came the wettest year of record; the

rainfall piled up 50 inches. Prairie chicken declined,

perhaps owing to hard rains.

In 1875 four hunters killed 153 prairie chickens

at York Prairie, one county to the eastward. In the

same year, the U.S. Fish Commission planted Atlantic

salmon in Devil‟s Lake, 10 miles south of my oak.

In 1874 the first factory-made barbed wire was

stapled to oak trees; I hope no such artifacts are buried

in the oak now saw!

In 1873 one Chicago firm received and

marketed 25,000 prairie chickens. The Chicago trade

collectively bought 600,000 at $3.25 per dozen.

In 1872, the last wild Wisconsin turkey was

killed, two counties to the southwest.

It is appropriate that the decade ending the

pioneer carousal in wheat should likewise have ended

the pioneer carousal in pigeon blood. In 1871, within

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a 50-mile triangle spreading northwestward from my

oak, 136 million pigeons are estimated to have nested

and some may have nested in it, for it was then a

thrifty sapling 20 feet tall. Pigeon hunters by scores

plied their trade with net and gun, club and salt lick,

and trainloads of prospective pigeon pie moved

southward and eastward toward the cities. It was the

last big nesting in Wisconsin, and nearly the last in

any state.

This same year 1871 brought other evidence of

the march of empire; the Peshtigo Fire, which cleared

a couple of counties of trees and soil, and the Chicago

Fire said to have started from a protesting kick of a

cow.

Rest! cries the chief sawyer, and we pause for

breath.

* * -9- * *

Our saw now cuts the 1860‟s, when thousands

dies to settle the question: Is the man-man community

lightly to be dismembered? They settled it, but they

did not see, nor do we yet see, that the same question

applies to the man-land community.

This decade was not without its gropings

toward the larger issue. In 1868 Increase A. Lapham

induced the State Horticultural Society of offer prizes

for forest plantation. In 1866 the last native

Wisconsin elk was killed. The saw now severs 1865,

the pith-year of our oak. In that year John Muir

offered to by from his brother, who then owned the

home farm thirty miles east of my oak, a sanctuary for

the wildflowers that had gladdened his youth. His

brother declined to part with the land, but he could not

suppress the idea. 1865 still stands in Wisconsin

history as the birth year of mercy for things natural,

wild and free.

We have cut the core. Our saw now reverses its

orientation in history; we cut backward across the

years and outward toward the far side of the stump. At

last there is a tremor in the great trunk; the saw kerf

suddenly widens; the saw is quickly pulled as the

sawyers spring backward to safety; all hands cry

“Timber!”; my oak leans, groans, and crashes with

earth-shaking thunder, to lie prostrate across the

emigrant road that give it birth.

-10-

Now comes the job of making wood. The maul

rings on steel wedges as the sections of trunk are

upended one by one, only to fall apart in fragrant slabs

to be corded by the roadside.

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There is an allegory for historians in the diverse

functions of saw, wedge, and axe.

The saw works only across the years, which it

must deal with one by one, in sequence. From each

year the raker teeth pull little chips of fact, which

accumulate in little piles, called sawdust by

woodsmen and archives by historians; both judge the

character of what lies within by the character of the

samples thus made visible without.

It is not until the transect is completed that the tree

falls, and the stump yields a collective view of a

century. By its fall the tree attests the unity of the

hodge-podge called history.

The wedge, on the other hand, works only in

radial splits; such a split yields a collective view of

all the years at once, or no view at all, depending on

the skill with which the plane of the split is chosen ( If

in doubt, let the section season for a year until a crack

develops. Many a hastily driven wedge lies rusting in

the woods, imbedded in unsplittable cross-grain.)

The axe functions only at an angle diagonal to

the years, and this only for the peripheral rings of the

recent past. Its special function is to lop limbs for

which both the saw and wedge are useless.

The three tools are requisite to good oak, and to

good history.

-11-

These things I ponder as the kettle sings, and the good

oak burns to red coals on white ashes. Those ashes,

come spring, I will return to the orchard at the foot of

the sandhill. They will come back to me again,

perhaps as red apples, or perhaps as a spirit of

enterprise in some fat October squirrel, who, for

reasons unknown to himself, is bent on planting

acorns.

Thinking Like a Mountain

A deep chesty bawl echoes from rimrock to rimrock,

rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far

blackness of the night. It is an outburst of wild defiant

sorrow, and of contempt for all the adversities of the

world. Every living thing (and perhaps many a dead

one as well) pays heed to that call. To the deer it is a

reminder of the way of all flesh, to the pine a forecast

of midnight scuffles and of blood upon the snow, to

the coyote a promise of gleanings to come, to the

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cowman a threat of red ink at the bank, to the hunter a

challenge of fang against bullet. Yet behind these

obvious and immediate hopes and fears there lies a

deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself.

Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen

objectively to the howl of a wolf.

Those unable to decipher the hidden meaning know

nevertheless that it is there, for it is felt in all wolf

country, and distinguishes that country from all other

land. It tingles in the spine of all who hear wolves by

night, or who scan their tracks by day. Even without

sight or sound of wolf, it is implicit in a hundred small

events: the midnight whinny of a pack horse, the rattle

of rolling rocks, the bound of a fleeing deer, the way

shadows lie under the spruces. Only the ineducable

tyro can fail to sense the presence or absence of

wolves, or the fact that mountains have a secret

opinion about them.

My own conviction on this score dates from the day I

saw a wolf die. We were eating lunch on a high

rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed

its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording

the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she

climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we

realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others,

evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and

all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and

playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves

writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at

the foot of our rimrock.

In those days we had never heard of passing up a

chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping

lead into the pack, but with more excitement than

accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always

confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf

was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into

impassable slide-rocks.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce

green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have

known ever since, that there was something new to

me in those eyes - something known only to her and

to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-

itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more

deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise.

But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that

neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a

view.

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Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate

its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly

wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes

wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen

every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to

anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen

every edible tree defoliated to the height of a

saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had

given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him

all other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the

hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach

with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the

high-lined junipers.

I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal

fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal

fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for

while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced

in two or three years, a range pulled down by too

many deer may fail of replacement in as many

decades. So also with cows. The cowman who cleans

his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking

over the wolf's job of trimming the herd to fit the

range. He has not learned to think like a mountain.

Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the

future into the sea.

We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life,

and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the

cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen,

the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it

all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A

measure of success in this is all well enough, and

perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too

much safety seems to yield only danger in the long

run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau's dictum: In

wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is

the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long

known among mountains, but seldom perceived

among men.

The Land Ethic

The Ethical Sequence

[The] extension of ethics, so far studied only by

philosophers, is actually a process in ecological

evolution. Its sequence may be described in ecological

as well as in philosophic terns. An ethic, ecologically,

is a limitation on freedom action in the struggle for

existence. An ethic, philosophically is a

differentiation of social from anti-social conduct.

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These are two definitions of one thing. The thing has

its origin in the tendency of interdependent

individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-

operation. The ecologist calls fees symbioses. Politics

and economics are advanced symbioses in which the

original free-for-all competition has been re placed, in

part, by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical

content. . . .

There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to

land and to the animals and plants which grow upon

it. Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls, is still property.

The land relation is still strictly economic, entailing

privileges but no obligations.

The extension of ethics to this third element in human

environment is, if I read the evidence correctly, an

evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity. It

is the third step in a sequence. The first two have

already been taken. Individual thinkers since the days

of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the

despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but

wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their

belief. I regard the present conservation movement as

the embryo of such an affirmation.

An ethic may be regarded as a mode of guidance for

meeting ecological situations so new or intricate, or

involving such deferred reactions, that the path of

social expediency is not discernible to the average

individual. Animal instincts are modes of guidance for

the individual in meeting such situations. Ethics are

possibly a kind of community instinct in-the-making.

The Community Concept

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise:

that the individual is a member of a community of

interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to

compete for his place in that community, but his

ethics prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order

that there may be a place to compete for).

The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the

community to include soils, waters, plants, and

animals, or collectively: the land.

This sounds simple: do we not already sing our love

for and obligation to the land of the free and the home

of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we

love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending

helter-skelter downriver Certainly not the waters,

which we assume have no function except to turn

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turbines, float barges, and carry off sewage Certainly

not the plants, of which we exterminate whole

communities without batting an eye. Certainly not the

animals, of which we have already extirpated many of

the largest and most beautiful species. A land ethic of

course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and

use of these 'resources,' but it does affirm their right

to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their

continued existence in a natural state.

In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo

sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to

plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for

his fellow-members, and also respect for the

community as such. . . .

That man is, in fact, only a member of a biotic team is

shown by an ecological interpretation of history.

Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in

terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic

interactions between people and land. The

characteristics of the land determined the facts quite

as potently as the characteristics of the men who lived

on it.. . .

We are commonly told what the human actors in this

drama tried to do, but we are seldom told that their

success, or the lack of it, hung in large degree on the

reaction of particular soils to the impact of the

particular forces exerted by their occupancy. . . .

Plant succession steered the course of history; the

pioneer simply demonstrated, for good or ill, which

successions inhered in the land. Is history taught in

this spirit? It will be, once the concept of land as a

community really penetrates our intellectual life. . . .

The Land Pyramid

An ethic to supplement and guide the economic

relation to land presupposes the existence of some

mental image of land as a biotic mechanism. We can

be ethical only in relation to something we can see,

feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.

The image commonly employed in conservation

education is 'the balance of nature.' For reasons too

lengthy to detail here, this figure of speech fails to

describe accurately what little we know about the land

mechanism. A much truer image is the one employed

in ecology: the biotic pyramid. I shall first sketch the

pyramid as a symbol of land, and later develop some

of its implications in terms of land-use.

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Plants absorb energy from the sun. This energy flow

through a circuit called the biota, which may be

represented by a pyramid consisting of layers. The

bottom layer is the soil. A plant layer rests on the soil,

an insect layer on the plants, a bird and rodent layer

on the insects, and so on up through various animal

groups to the apex layer, which consists of the larger

carnivores.

The species of a layer are alike not in where they

came from, or in what they look like, but rather in

what they eat Each successive layer depends on those

below it for food and often for other services, and

each in turn furnishes food and services to those

above. Proceeding upward, each successive layer

decreases in numerical abundance. Thus, for every

carnivore there are hundreds of his prey, thousands of

their prey, millions of insects, uncountable plants. The

pyramidal form of the system reflects this numerical

progression from apex to base. Man shares an

intermediate layer with the bears, raccoons, and

squirrels which eat both meat and vegetables.

The lines of dependency for food and other services

are called food chains. Thus soil-oak-deer-Indian is a

chain that has now been largely converted to soil-

corn-cow-farmer. Each species, including ourselves,

is a link in many chains. The deer eats a hundred

plants other than oak, and the cow a hundred plants

other than corn. Both, then, are links in a hundred

chains. The pyramid is a tangle of chains so complex

as to seem disorderly, yet the stability of the system

proves it to be a highly organized structure. Its

functioning depends on the co-operation and

competition of its diverse parts.

In the beginning, the pyramid of life was low and

squat; the food chains short and simple Evolution has

added layer after layer, link after link. Man is one of

thousands of accretions to the height and complexity

of the pyramid. Science has given us many doubts, but

it has given us at least one certainty: the trend of

evolution is to elaborate and diversify the biota.

Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of

energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and

animals. food chains are the living channels which

conduct energy up ward; death and decay return it to

the soil. The circuit is no closed; some energy is

dissipated in decay, some is added b absorption from

the air, some is stored in soils, peats, and long-lived

forests; but it is a sustained circuit, like a slowly

augmented revolving fund of life. There is always a

net loss y downhill wash, but this is normally small

15

and offset by the decay of rocks. It is deposited in the

ocean and, in the course of geological time, raised to

form new lands and new pyramids.

The velocity and character of the upward flow of

energy depend on the complex structure of the plant

and animal community, much as the upward flow of

sap in a tree depends on its complex cellular

organization. Without this complexity, normal

circulation would presumably not occur. Structure

means the characteristic numbers, as well as the

characteristic kinds and functions, of the component

species. this interdependence between the complex

structure of the land and its smooth functioning as an

energy unit is one of its basic attributes.

When a change occurs in one part of the circuit, many

other parts must adjust themselves to it. Change does

not necessarily obstruct or divert the flow of energy;

evolution is a long series of self-induced changes, the

net result of which has been to elaborate the flow

mechanism and to lengthen the circuit. Evolutionary

changes, however, are usually slow and local. Man's

invention of tools has enable him to make changes of

unprecedented violence, rapidity) and scope.

One change is in the composition of floras and fauna

The larger predators are lopped of f the apex of the

pyramid food chains, for the first time in history,

become short rather than longer. Domesticated species

from other land are substituted for wild ones, and wild

ones are moved new habitats. In this world-wide

pooling of faunas an floras, some species get out of

bounds as pests and disease others are extinguished.

Such effects are seldom intended foreseen; they

represent unpredicted and often untraceable

readjustments in the structure. Agricultural science is

large a race between the emergence of new pests and

the emergence of new techniques for their control.

Another change touches the flow of energy through

plant and animals and its return to the soil. Fertility is

the ability of soil to receive, store, and release energy.

Agriculture, by overdrafts on the soil, or by too

radical a substitution domestic for native species in

the superstructure, may derange the channels of flow

or deplete storage. Soils depleted of their storage, or

of the organic matter which anchors it wash away

faster than they form. This is erosion.

Waters, like soil, are part of the energy circuit.

Industry by polluting waters or obstructing them with

16

dams, may exclude the plants and animals necessary

to keep energy in circulation.

Transportation brings about another basic change: the

plants or animals grown in one region are now

consumed and returned to the soil in another.

Transportation taps the energy stored in rocks, and in

the air, and uses it elsewhere; thus we fertilize the

garden with nitrogen gleaned by the guano birds from

the fishes of seas on the other side of the Equator.

Thus the formerly localized and self-contained

circuits are pooled on a world-wide scale.

The process of altering the pyramid for human

occupation releases stored energy, and this often gives

rise, during the Pioneering period, to a deceptive

exuberance of plant and animal life, both wild and

tame. These releases of biotic capital tend to becloud

or postpone the penalties of violence.

This thumbnail sketch of land as an energy circuit

conveys three basic ideas:

1. That land is not merely soil. 2. That the native plants and animals kept the

energy circuit open; others may or may not,

3. That man-made changes are of a different order than evolutionary changes, and have effects

more comprehensive than is intended or

foreseen

These ideas, collectively, raise two basic issues: Can

the land adjust itself to the new order? Can the desired

alterations be accomplished with less violence?

Biotas seem to differ in their capacity to sustain

violent conversion. Western Europe, for example,

carries a far different pyramid than Caesar found

there. Some large animals are lost; swampy forests

have become meadows or plow land; many new

plants and animals are introduced, some of which

escaped as pests; the remaining natives are greatly

changed in distribution and abundance. Yet the soil is

still there and, with the help of imported nutrients,

still fertile, the waters flow normally; the new

structure seems to function and to persist. There is no

visible stoppage or derangement of the circuit. . . .

The combined evidence of history and ecology seems

to support one general deduction: the less violent the

man made changes, the greater the probability of

successful readjustment in the pyramid. Violence, in

turn, varies with human population density; a dense

17

population requires more violent conversion. In this

respect, North America has a better chance for

permanence than Europe, if she can contrive to limit

her density.

This deduction runs counter to our current philosophy

which assumes that because a small increase in

density enriched human life, that an indefinite

increase will enrich it indefinitely. Ecology knows of

no density relationship that holds for indefinitely wide

limits. All gains from density are subject to a law of

diminishing returns.

Whatever may be the equation for men and land, it is

improbable that we as yet know all its terms. Recent

discoveries in mineral and vitamin nutrition reveal

unsuspected dependencies in the up-circuit: incredibly

minute quantities of certain substances determine the

value of soils to plants, of plants to animals. What of

the down-circuit? What of the vanishing species, the

preservation of which we now regard as an esthetic

luxury? They helped build the soil; in which

unsuspected ways may they be essential to its

maintenance? Professor Weaver proposes that we use

prairie flowers to re-flocculate the wasting soils of the

dust bowl; who knows what purpose cranes and

condors, otters and grizzlies may some day be used?

The Outlook

It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to

land can exist without love, respect, and admiration

for land and a high regard for its value. By value, I of

course mean something far broader than mere

economic value; I mean value in the philosophical

sense.

Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the

evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our

educational and economic system is headed away

from, rather than toward, a intense consciousness of

land. Your true modern is separate from the land by

many middlemen, and by innumerable physical

gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the

space between cities on which crops grow. Turn him

loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not

happen to be a golf links or a 'scenic' area, he is bored

stiff. If crops could be raised by hydroponics instead

of farming, it would suit him very well. Synthetic

substitutes for wood, leather, wool, and other natural

land products suit him better than the originals. In

short, land is something he has 'outgrown.'

Almost equally serious as an obstacle to a land ethic is

the attitude of the farmer for whom the land is still an

18

adversary or a taskmaster that keeps him in slavery.

Theoretically, the mechanization of farming ought to

cut the farmer's chains, ' but whether it really does is

debatable.

One of the requisites for an ecological comprehension

of land is an understanding of ecology, and this is by

no means co-extensive with 'education'; in fact, much

higher education seems deliberately to avoid

ecological concepts. An understanding of ecology

does not necessarily originate in courses bearing

ecological labels; it is quite as likely to be labeled

geography, botany, agronomy, history, or economics.

this is as it should be, but whatever the label,

ecological training is scarce.

The case for a land ethic would appear hopeless but

for the minority which is in obvious revolt against

these 'modern' trends.

The 'key-log' which must be moved to release the

evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit

thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic

problem. Examine each question in terms of what is

ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is

economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends

to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the

biotic community. It is wrong when it tends

otherwise.

It of course goes without saying that economic

feasibility limits the tether of what can or cannot be

done for land. It always has and it always will. The

fallacy the economic determinists have tied around

our collective neck, and which we now need to cast

off, is the belief that economics determines all land-

use. This is simply not true. An innumerable host of

actions and attitudes, comprising perhaps the bulk of

all land relations, is determined by the land-users'

tastes an predilections, rather than by his purse. The

bulk of all land relations hinges on investments of

time, forethought, skill and faith rather than on

investments of cash. As a land-user thinketh, so is he.

I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product

of social evolution because nothing so important as an

ethic is ever 'written.' Only the most superficial

student of history supposes that Moses 'wrote' the

Decalogue; it evolved in the minds of a thinking

community, and Moses wrote tentative summary of it

for a 'seminar.' I say tentative because evolution never

stops.

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The evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual as well

an emotional process. Conservation is paved with

good intentions which prove to be futile, or even

dangerous, because they are devoid of critical

understanding either of the land or of economic land-

use. I think it is a truism that as the ethical frontier

advances from the individual to the community, its

intellectual content increases.

The mechanism of operation is the same for any ethic:

social approbation for right actions: social disapproval

for wrong actions.

By and large, our present problem is one of attitudes

and implements. We are remodeling the Alhambra

with a steam shovel, and we are proud of our yardage.

We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all

has many good points but we are in need of gentler

and more objective criteria for its successful use.