A Land Ethic....

 “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.”  Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
For the past week I’ve been struggling to find words for what’s in my heart about land, words that will reach others’ hearts and influence their minds about the future of a particular piece of land with an exquisite history and present fertility:  Quaker Oaks Farm.  
The owners, Bill and Beth Lovett, who have operated Quaker Oaks Christmas Tree Farm there for almost 20 years, are highly aware of this land’s cultural and ecological value.  They wish to protect it from having those values stripped away when its economic value soars, tempting future owners to sell out.  There are multiple ways to do that, and a non-profit organization has been formed to help make those decisions and  steward the land in its new vocation.  But it seemed words were missing defining what’s being undertaken, so I offered my services.
I found myself pulling books down from a high shelf where they’ve been since 1993.  When my hands reached Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, I read the last chapter, “The Land Ethic.”  Found words.
This book was first published in 1949, just after Leopold (a forestry professor at the University of Wisconsin) died fighting a grass fire on a neighbor’s farm shortly after he became an advisor on conservation to the United Nations.  He was that kind of man.  He was 60.
The book was republished in paperback in 1968 and became a flagship for the environmental movement that us back-to-the-landers needed when we discovered how hard it is to live from the land alone. But what he says about the need for a land ethic is still fresh.
Writing less than a decade after the socio-ecological disaster of the Dust Bowl, Leopold announced in the book’s preface “Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land.  We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.  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...of contributing to culture.”
He ends the book with this analogy:  “By and large, our present problem is one of attitudes and implements.  We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steamshovel, 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.”  
In between, in 25 short pages Leopold takes us through his logic and his experience, his loves and despairs, but leaves us with no magic recipe.  What he leaves us with is the simple understanding that we’re in need of developing a land ethic before our ethic-less treatment of land leaves us hungry and homeless.