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18 ARTS AND SCIENCES I(#> Between Imagination and Observation Gary Paul Nabhan Within an hour ofwatching the mating "sky dance" of the woodcock for the very first time, I leaned back against an oak trunk near the IllinoisWisconsin border and read Leopold's essay about this very same avian ritual.1 And I was astonished. Like many readers before and since, I was astonished not merely by the scientific precision of his phenomenological descriptions, but by their artfulness as well. Could it be, I wondered, that both good field science and fine art are rooted in the same medium, the ecotone between the cultivated skill of careful observation and the wilds of the human imagination? Leopold spent his life in such ecotones, roaming between Iowa's croplands and its remnant prairies; between Wisconsin's dairy farms and their sandy, untended margins; between the Southwest's yellow pine forests and its ancient agricultural terraces. He somehow came to feel as comfortable at Yale as he did hunting quail, and to read deer tracks with as much interest as he did the classic literature of the Western world. A century before Leopold, Henry David Thoreau was often frustrated in his attempts at understanding nineteenth-century natural science while maintaining a transcendentalist poet's world view: "What sort of science," he asked, "is that which enriches the understanding but robs the imagination?" He worried that his own detailed scientific observations of plant dispersal and animal behavior made for dull reading. One critic agreed, claiming that Thoreau's ''views as wide as heaven" had been "narrowed down to the microscope," as he had feared.2 Leopold, on the other hand, seldom doubted that artistic prose was compatible with astute scientific observation. He was delighted whenever he found such dovetailing in the works of his colleagues. Rigorously trained in the scientific method, but having always read widely in other fields, he gradually integrated more and more imaginative elements into his natural history writing. Leopold's narrative prose fully blossomed late in his life, after he had fully established his credibility as a scientist with countless data-laden, expository articles. Perhaps for that reason, 269 270 Part III. Conservation and Culture he could say that science was not enough if it stood alone-that to approach a full understanding of the world, its ethical, poetic, and spiritual dimensions must be fully integrated. Long-practiced in writing expressively to his mother, other family members, friends, and colleagues, Leopold then turned his skills as a storyteller toward reaching a larger audience. Leopold was not the only scientist-writer of his era to do so: Donald Culross Peattie, Edwin Way Teale, Paul Errington, Ed Ricketts, John Steinbeck, Loren Eiseley, G. Evelyn Hutchinson, Archie Carr, Vladimir Nabokov, Rachael Carson, Edgar Anderson, and Carl Sauer were also adept at finding in the natural sciences metaphors which illuminated the human condition. They too were eloquent spokespersons for the wild world around them. But perhaps none grounded his or her personal philosophy in such a profound understanding of the structure and function of natural communities. It is because of his eminence as a scientist-philosopher as well as his grace as a writer that Leopold, more than any of these other literary scientists, enabled the next generation of scientists to explore their poetic voices without apology. Leopold's prose legitimized the position that a competent scientist should be sanctioned to write persuasively and gracefully in many styles, for many audiences, ifindeed his or her subject matter really "matters." In this sense Leopold's heirs are many, from David Ehrenfeld, E. O. Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould, andJared Diamond to WesJackson, Richard Nelson, and David Quammen. Recent studies confirm what Leopold intuitively understood and exemplified : that narrative stories are not only more interesting to students than didactic, expository texts covering the same topics, but that stories have greater staying power and evoke more activism. Story is one of the most effective means we have for keeping the complexity of the natural world in our heads. If the biophilia hypothesis is ever rigorously tested, will cognitive scientists confirm that we are hard-wired to understand more natural history as story than as baldly posited facts in computergenerated graphic models or as mathematical theory? Read Leopold's tales from Sand County, then juxtapose them with any quantitatively oriented text on wildlife management, then write me in a year to tell me what you remember of both. All this said, it would be inaccurate to summarize Leopold's...

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