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176 Lauret E. Savoy To See the Whole: A Future of Environmental Writing Events do indeed take place; they bear meaning in relation to the things around them. And I, too, happen to take place, each day of my life, in my environment. I exist in a landscape, and my existence is indivisible with the land. —N. Scott Momaday Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars? — Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again” Iwas fourteen when I first read A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. That his 1949 book was hailed as “landmark” or, in Wallace Stegner’s words, “a famous, almost holy book in conservation circles” I knew nothing about. What appealed to my fourteen-year-old sensibilities were the intimate images of land and seasons in place and the seeming openness of this man’s struggle to frame a personal truth. In the last essay, “The Land Ethic,” Leopold enlarged the community’s boundaries “to include soil, water, plants, animals, or collectively: the land,” and his call for an extension of ethics to land relations expressed a sense of responsibility and reciprocity not yet embraced by this nation but embedded in many indigenous traditions of experience. To adolescent me, his ideas forced new questions and suggested troubling possibility. In a book so concerned with America’s past, why was it that the only reference to slavery, to human beings as property, was of ancient Greece? Only uncertainty and estrangement felt within my teenage reach, as if the book’s “we” and “us” excluded me and people with ancestral roots in Africa, Asia, and Native America. If, as Leopold wrote “obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to land,” then what part of this nation still lacked conscience broad enough to realize the internal change of mind and heart, to embrace 177 Lauret E. Savoy what Leopold had called an “evolutionary possibility” and “ecological necessity”? Why was it that in the United States I knew at age fourteen human relations could be so cruel? We all carry history within us, the past(s) becoming present in what we think and do, in who we are. Ecological interdependence between human beings and the land is framed by this history, which informs our senses of place and our connections with each other. Deeply rooted values and economic norms have institutionalized exploiting and manipulating the natural world—by fragmenting ecosystems, threatening biological diversity, and changing the atmosphere’s nature through fossil-fuel burning. And few honest self-reflections have yet considered how the roots of our “democratic” values and institutions link to sanctioned violence for power and profit, to class conflict, to the exclusion of peoples of color in a still deeply racialized America. Compromising of nature, and compromising of human beings by “racial” separatism and inequities in political and economic power, in large measure define our American past and present. Witness poor communities of color that continue to suffer disproportionate levels of environmental pollution and toxicity. Witness the continued curtailing of civil rights and cutting back of even basic assistance to the poor and disenfranchised. We, in every aspect of our lives, have ecological ancestors because we all have been in relation, whether admitted or not, in time and place. It is key to recognize the biodiversity of self and of others, and resist any mono-identity or mono-culture of mind, self, and knowledge. EuroAmerican ecological ancestry is not the whole. Consider these examples: As African American abolitionists fought and wrote against slavery, they also fought and wrote against the use of arsenic in tobacco fields; The idea of wilderness as untouched land to be preserved was accomplished hand-in-hand with its forced de-peopling and removal of native peoples to reservations; A 1915 essay in the Atlantic Monthly by W.E.B. Du Bois on the African roots of the First World War is as much an environmental essay as a piece written that year on the need for a national park system. But it’s never been thought of as...

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