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19 LAND ESTHETICS ~ Through Successive Stages of the Beautiful Joni L. Kinsey The land ethic was, in many ways, Aldo Leopold's crowning achievement . Although it proposes a radical reconception of traditional relationships , the ethic is based on a remarkably simple premise: that humans are members of the land community who must respect the existence of their "fellow-members"l-other living things-and the common environment upon which all depend for sustenance and survival. Leopold's genius lay not only in the formulation of the idea, but in its vehicle: an exceptionally engaging and accessible book that charms as it instructs, inspires even as it sobers. As the quotations in this volume illustrate , the same quality was evident in much of Leopold's other writing as well. For all of its simplicity in form and fundamental message, Leopold's writing was remarkably complex. Just as Leopold could find within a single crane, flower, or tree, a world of telling nuance and significance, so too do his proposals and his writing reveal within their concise precision a web of understanding, both of human action and perception and of the natural world and its workings. Leopold's writing, in Sand County and elsewhere, drew upon his broad experience in many aspects of land management, both personal and professional. It is informed prominently of course by the natural sciences . No less integral, however, to its persuasive power and compelling elegance is Leopold's ability to draw on psychology, philosophy, and esthetics -all interrelated humanistic disciplines-allowing him to convey to his readers the importance of his ideas and observations in their own lives. Ofthese, esthetics may be at once the most and least appreciated, for it lies at both the surface ofhis writing and at the heart ofhis message. The most commonly recognized aspect of esthetics-the visual-especially marks the essays of A Sand County Almanac. In the book's first part, the "almanac" itself, Leopold overtly observes his surroundings over the course of a year. Every element is seen and many described with a wealth of visual detail. Every page conjures pictures of great variety, 279 280 Part III. Conservation and Culture color, texture, and shape, from the smallest leaf to the most panoramic scene. Leopold also employs motifs from the esthetic world. He sees a river, for example, as an artist painting the landscape as it provides successive layers of colors, textures, and shapes of plants and animal tracks: "It is a river who wields the brush, and it is the same river who, before I can bring my friends to view his work, erases it forever from human view. Mter that it exists only in my mind's eye."2 Sound is another esthetic which both fascinates and preoccupies Leopold . Although he often appreciates the "music" of nature for its own sake, in other instances he characterizes it in strikingly visual terms: ''What one remembers is the invisible hermit thrush pouring silver chords from impenetrable shadows; the soaring crane trumpeting from behind a cloud; the prairie chicken booming from the mists of nowhere; the quail's Ave Maria in the hush ofdawn."3 Here Leopold describes sounds as coloristic effects, "silver chords from impenetrable shadows," but even more intriguing is the intangibility of their presence. The observed is, ironically, unseen, but all the more memorable for its invisibility. Leopold does not neglect other esthetic creations in his observations, finding poetry, for example, in the smallest aspects of natural life: "whereas I write a poem by dint of mighty cerebration, the yellow-leg walks a better one just by lifting his foot."4 Such eloquent articulations of common events in the natural world are the most easily appreciated aspects of Leopold's work. He knew that he had to engage his audience, walking with them from their first observations to their fullest recognitions : "Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language."5 But beauty is not only in details or even in sweeping vistas. Leopold's most important contribution to esthetics may be in his appreciation of landscapes usually considered ordinary or even worthless. His own wornout plot in central Wisconsin offers him endless encounters with the extraordinary, and he consistently affirms the special qualities of bogs, marshes, and prairies, seeing the mysteries of life even in backyard weeds. In this, as Roderick Nash has argued, he is...

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