A Fierce Kind of Love

Reprint from Life Unplugged Column, Tucson Green Times. August

by Susan L. Feathers

Homelands shape our behavior, culinary habits, dress, and vernacular. Landscape even sculpts regional character. In turn we shape the landscape. While most will agree, we rarely pay attention to how this relationship is at the crux of our current struggle to live more harmoniously with land, water, and sky.

Long ago early human tribes hunted large game to near extinction but learned to move to let it come back. Then there were small numbers of us. The lands could revive after an intense harvest from humankind. Now we are pervasive in every landscape and we have settled permanently in a place to where our harvest is making lasting changes in the natural landscape and among its living communities.

We fill-in wetlands to live by the shore, blade the desert’s flora to perch our houses on its quiet edge; carve roads, plane hills and chop trees for panoramic views. Down in the rich bottomland of valleys we plow the topsoil and reroute the waters for our farms and towns. Our love of the earth is a fierce kind of love.

Once there was a man–a forest ranger and scientist named Aldo Leopold. He rode horse back in Arizona and New Mexico’s highlands in the early twentieth century, sketching his thoughts down in journals, observing the changing landscape with each year’s influx of settlers and entrepreneurs. Over many years of forestry and wildlife management he developed a land ethic. The Leopold legacy is an American treasure:

Leopold defined conservation as a way of life in which land does well for its inhabitants, citizens do well by their land, and both end up better by reason of partnership. Aldo Leopold recognized that no matter how sophisticated we become, people will always depend on the land—“the land” being shorthand for the community that not only includes and values people but also plants, animals, soils, and waters, from the highest strata of the atmosphere to the depths of the ocean. (1)

When a person begins to understand this reciprocal relationship with the land around him, Leopold said he had developed an ecological conscience. He wrote that civilized society must cease to judge a decision about land simply by whether it is economically expedient, but rather to decide by whether it protects the living community’s integrity - which in the end assures its productivity and our economic wealth and well being.

Leopold was no paragon of virtue. He gained insight while participating in the same cultural ideas and practices that he eventually came to discard. What is important is how he examined the wisdom of prevailing science, policy, and business assumptions of his times in light of actual outcomes for land, wildlife, and people.

I think often of Leopold, about being alive when wilderness was a true presence in the human psyche. Recognizing the forces that would destroy it, he toiled for the remaining years of his life to influence wildlife policy and public understanding to conserve all that has made us rich in the first place.

In 2009 the nation will celebrate the Leopold Centennial. Might this year give us opportunity to reexamine our relationship to land and make it right?

(1) Aldo Leopold Legacy Center: http://www.aldoleopold.org/legacycenter/philosophy.html