Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab: The Emergence of Environmentalism

13. Ricketts’s Approach

125 While Leopold’s worldview was ecological and utilitarian (what J.B. Callicott has called a transformative vision), Ed Ricketts’s worldview was ecological and holistic (what Callicott calls a transcendent vision).1 According to Richard Astro, Ricketts used the principles of ecology to grasp and understand the totality of things. His search for order was centered on a quest to find “our emotional relationship to the world conceived as a whole, . . . ‘a unified field hypothesis’ in which ‘everything is an index of everything else.’”2 While most biologists, including Leopold, tended (and still tend) to view ecology as individuals having relationships, Ricketts viewed ecology as relationships having individuals. That is, for Ricketts, the relationships were often primary; who or what was having them was secondary. It was this emphasis, extended in an internally consistent way to his own behavior, that created many of Ricketts’s personal problems. Unlike Leopold, Ricketts was not particularly interested in voluntary forms of restraint. There were other differences between the ways that Leopold chap ter thirteen Ricketts’s Approach 126 / Ricketts’s Approach and Ricketts thought. On the one hand, Leopold defined ecology in utilitarian terms, with imposed value judgments—“Ecology tries to understand the interactions between living things and their environment. Every living thing represents an equation of give and take. Man or mouse, oak or orchid, we take a livelihood from our land and our fellows, and give in return an endless succession of acts and thoughts, each of which changes us, our fellows, our land, and its capacity to yield us a further living. Ultimately we give ourselves.”3 On the other, Ricketts defined ecology in holistic terms of acceptance, as “the study of relationships, of living relationships.” He wrote, “I got to thinking about the ecological method, the value of building, of trying to build, whole pictures. No one can controvert it. An ecologist has to consider the parts each in its place and as related to rather than as subsidiary to the whole.”4 One of Ricketts’s best explanations of his worldview came in 1940. His friend, modernist composer John Cage, was teaching concepts of music in the Bay Area. In December Ricketts and Cage returned to Monterey together. In a letter to Toni Jackson about the trip, Ricketts wrote, [John Cage] and I had a very pleasant trip back. We worked out an understanding, almost a statement of our differences of viewpoint. It involves, as I suspected, a real honest to god fundamental, a right or left turn up the steep mountain, and surely involves in culture that same primitive cleavage apparent now in government: as an individual or a communal point of departure. And he represents the probably upcoming thing. Divine inspired geometry is a good term. A square or a black line is more nearly the same for all people—therefore a great leveller—than a folksong or a picture of a cow or a Shakespeare sonnet, or more even Ricketts’s Approach / 127 than the tones or words etc. of which they’re composed. But all my tendencies are toward ‘meaning,’ while his are toward ‘organization’ as such. I regard content as primary, he form. It’s more than the old controversy, it represents actually a fundamental divergence (although I still think it’s the mountain that’s of deepest importance). And his is unquestionably the purest thing.5 As Astro points out, Ricketts used ecology as he consciously worked toward a method by which man might recognize and understand the relatedness of living things.6 Ultimately, Ricketts settled on a philosophy that he called “breaking through.” He took the label from Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Roan Stallion” (“Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break through”), and defined breaking through as an “inner coherency of feeling and thought which leads man into a ‘deep participation ’ and enables him to tie together apparently unrelated pictures and see that ‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts.’” Further , he wanted to “achieve that integrative moment of living in which one understands things ‘which are not transient by means of things that are.’”7 Astro notes that Ricketts tried long and hard to find a means by which he could communicate “the deep thing.”8 The method Ricketts chose he inappropriately called nonteleological or is thinking . This view is laid out in the March...