An Aldo Leopold Earth Day
It is Earth Day and that is a good thing, but with the forces marshaled against it, more than one day will be needed. As with all symbols the actual day is the least important part of the movement, which through the Earth Day Network has done great work in bringing to the forefront of peoples’ consciousness our need to conserve.
“Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect” – Aldo Leopold, 1948
Eventually, with good peoples’ work, albeit one battle at a time, painful to witness, with some won and some lost the tide of knowledge will rebuff the avaricious, the careless, and the hubristic.
To get there we have to be aware, to notice, to cut through the clutter.
“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.” — Aldo Leopold
For thirty years we lived in Los Angeles, commuted, competed, scuffled a living for us and our family alongside millions. Southern California is an intoxicatingly beautiful place despite the naysayers with much to offer the eye that chooses to behold. But in the career cauldron it is easy to become removed from earth processes and distractions dull the ability to focus on the truly worthy. It is not the place, but the lifestyle. When our first child, aged three, pulled a new grown carrot from the garden and proclaimed in wonderment “Look Dudda! A carrot! From the ground!” the vastness of the gap that Earth Day has to close became apparent.
Now for us is a different time and place and we have used some of the time afforded by the constrictions of winter to read some of the works of writers who laid down markers and lit beacons even before there was an Earth Day. One such, particularly remarkable, was Aldo Leopold, who in “A Sand County Almanac”, lays out powerfully the type of land ethic that Earth Day strives to bring awareness to.
In our tenth month here on the ranch we are still trying to synchronize our expectations of Montana climate with the reality. I take solace from the equally feeble efforts of the weathermen to do the same. Theirs is a mission impossible for the weather here has no stronger characteristic than unpredictability. March was temperate, warm enough to lure us into thinking it heralded spring. Sure enough the taupe pastures gained a hint of green and we awoke daily to the loud conversational honking of Canada Geese, surely a sign that winter was receding.
“ .. a migrating goose, staking two hundred miles of black night on the chance of finding a hole in the lake, has no easy chance for retreat. His arrival carries the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges.” — Aldo Leopold
But April was a retreat as snow came and came again. It lasts only a day or so and the moisture is much welcomed, but it tests the living things that have committed to the forward rush of spring.
So now to our Earth Day, a day not very different from all others here and yet unique and remarkable. The night had been cold, 9º F, and we arose to 10 inches or so of glistening powder, the air still full of silica like snow crystals. By late morning the sky cleared to brilliant blue and the sun, ever a little higher, clarified the air to such sharpness that distant mountains appeared as at fingertips.
Our walk over to the ranch for evening chores took less than an hour, but was so full it stretched to a saga. As usual scores of white-tail bursting across the pasture, their grace and agility only dulled by their abundance. Then horses grabbing mouthfuls of hay in the afternoon sun contented to be melting the ice off their backs before another freezing night. Chickens too, taking the rays, squabbling, scratching, always busy and always, to us, giving. A junco, stunned by over exuberant flight into the deceit of a large glass pane, cradled, warmed and put in a safe place. She seems OK. Ten minutes to cast a fly whilst Virginia organizes the egg fridge (we get more than two dozen a day now). I’m getting better at this. Two downstream drifts below the confluence, a slight dip of the head of the leader, strike and he’s hooked. This one is large for this creek and strong for the season.
“I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creel, but my memory.” — Aldo Leopold
We walk back, past a heron poised to hunt silently, but to me always Riff-Raff from the Rocky Horror Show, across plaited deer tracks and then, angel wings in the snow. A pair of Sandhill Cranes must have recently alighted here leaving perfect etchings of their form and function. There’s more. Gnarled cottonwood stumps, long-trained Magpies, rusty crossbills, exuberant calves. A surfeit. One hour’s walk with so much.
Tomorrow is not Earth Day, but it and all others should be.
We are privileged here to have these wonders so starkly apparent. But the truth is they are everywhere and the more we see them, the more we will cherish them and so fight the fight that Earth Day symbolizes.
“A March morning is only as drab as he who walks through it without a glance skyward, ear cocked for geese” — Aldo Leopold
