Companion to A Sand County Almanac: Interpretive and Critical Essays

Foreword

* Foreword ALDO LEOPOLD These essays deal with the ethics and esthetics ofland. During my lifetime, more land has been destroyed or damaged than ever before in recorded history. As a field-worker in conservation, I have seen, studied, and measured many samples ofthis process. During my lifetime, the stockpile ofscientific facts about land has grown from a molehill into a mountain. As a research ecologist , I have contributed to this pile. During my lifetime, the thing called conservation has grown from a nameless idea into a mighty national movement. As a sportsman and naturalist, I have helped it grow-in size-but so far it has seemed almost to shrink in potency. This concurrent growth in knowledge of land, good intentions toward land, and abuse of land presents a paradox that baffles me, as it does many another thinking citizen. Science ought to work the other way, but it doesn't. Why? We regard land as an economic resource, and science as a tool for extracting bigger and better livings from it. Both are obvious facts, but they are not truths, because they tell only halfthe story. There is a basic distinction between the fact that land yields us a living, and the inference that it exists for this purpose. The latter is about as true as to infer that I fathered three sons in order to replenish the woodpile. Science is, or should be, much more than a lever for easier 281 APPENDIX livings. Scientific discovery is nutriment for our sense ofwonder, a much more important matter than thicker steaks or bigger bathtubs. Art and letters, ethics and religion, law and folklore, still regard the wild things ofthe land either as enemies, or as food, or as dolls to be kept "for pretty." This view of land is our inheritance from Abraham, whose foothold in the land of milk and honey was still a precarious one, but it is outmoded for us. Our foothold is precarious, not because it may slip, but because we may kill the land before we learn to use it with love and respect. Conservation is a pipe-dream as long as Honw sapiens is cast in the role of conqueror, and his land in the role of slave and servant . Conservation becomes possible only when man assumes the role of citizen in a community of which soils and waters, plants and animals are fellow members, each dependent on the others, and each entitled to his place in the sun. These essays are one man's striving to live by and with, rather than on, the American land. I do not imply that this philosophy ofland was always clear to me. It is rather the end-result of a life-journey, in the course of which I have felt sorrow, anger, puzzlement, or confusion over the inability of conservation to halt the juggernaut of landabuse . These essays describe particular episodes en route. My first doubt about man in the role ofconqueror arose while I was still in college. I came home one Christmas to find that land promoters, with the help ofthe Corps of Engineers, had dyked and drained my boyhood hunting grounds on the Mississippi River bottoms. The job was so complete that I could not even trace the outlines of my beloved lakes and sloughs under their new blanket of cornstalks. I liked corn, but not that much. Perhaps no one but a hunter can understand how intense an affection a boy can feel for a piece of marsh. My home town thought the community enriched by this change, I thought it impoverished. It did not occur to me to express my sense ofloss in writing; myoid lake had been under corn for forty years before I wrote "Red Legs Kick282 1947 Foreword ing." Nor did I, until years later, formulate the generalization that drainage is bad, not in and ofitself; but when it becomes so prevalent that a fauna and flora are extinguished. My first job was as a forest ranger in the White Mountains of Arizona. There I conceived a large enthusiasm for the free life of the cow country, and I admired the mounted cowmen, many ofwhom were my friends. Through the usual process of hazing and horseplay, I-the tenderfoot-acquired some rudiments of skill as a horseman, packer, and mountaineer. When the advent of motor transport began to shrink the boundaries of the horse-culture, I...