For Love of the World: Essays on Nature Writers

The Husbandry of the Wild

The Husbandry of the Wild Forewords are usually last words, commentary on the work done. In respect to what has been accomplished they are placed first in order to open the text, to provide a way in. It seems appropriate, then, in talking about A Sand County Almanac, to begin with AIdo Leopold's introductory sentences, to hear how he says what he has to say. There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot. Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher "standard of living" is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech. These wild things, I admit, had little human value until mechanization assured us of a good breakfast, and until science disclosed the drama of where they came from and how they live. The whole conflict boils down to a question of degree. 37 We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not. These sentences exemplify one of Leopold's best styles, an easy, open, straighton , vernacular, spoken style. Every declaration is measured and firm but not contentious; ingratiating, rather, as prefactory statements should be, even though from first to last what is set out, characteristically, is polarized, a matter of opposition and conflict. This is a personal style, not the objective style of scientific work for example, Leopold's Game Management, which begins with a definition against which his achievement in A Sand County Almanac may be measured: "Game management is the art of making land produce sustained annual crops of wild game for recreational use." Leopold's personal style belongs to what, in his large archive (how did one who sat so long at a desk have time for fieldwork?), are called "philosophic and literary writings." This is a separate category in keeping with two critical distinctions, leisure (as against work) and country (as against land), both, in tum, related by a sense of adventure and "defiance of the contemporary." Almost all of Leopold's philosophic and literary writings required revision. The easy style didn't come easy; its artfulness was earned by attending to style as attentively as he attended to all serious matters. Leopold was always a writer, but this doesn't mean, as we sometimes say, that he was a natural writer. He had to learn to write, and in doing so traveled a long way from the occasional humorous scribbling of such early publications as the Pine Cone and the forceful and certain field dispatches of the enthuiastic forester. It does not detract from his achievement, then, to note in the first sentence ("There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot"), as elsewhere, that he mingles with his own voice the voice of E. B. White. The voices, say, of Thoreau and Muir, great writers whom he acknowledges, were not contemporary; there were profound historical reasons that prohibited their direct appropriation, one of them the diminishment of the singular that much besides ecology fostered, the awareness, as with White, that all a writer who speaks in propria persona can serve up is one man's meat. White, incidentally, brought out his essays under that name in 1942, essays written during his retreat to a saltwater farm in Maine. About this time Leopold proposed a Christmas book of essays that did not include many "shack essays," as those in the almanac section were called, or take its title from the round of things he did on the sand county farm he purchased in 1935. 38 ~ LEO POL 0 Especially resonant of White in this opener are the way of speaking and what is said. There is, for example, the political terminology, the insistence on freedom and inalienable rights that belonged to a time of domestic and global strife-the Great Depression and World War II. An unobtrusive terminology ("cost," "progress ," "'standard of living' ") introduces an important economic perspective. A scientific perspective also enters, with the word science, unquestioned here, a discloser of evolutionary and ecological knowledge and not, as Leopold knew...