A Conservationist and His Barbs

25 Aug, 2024

They about broke my heart, the couple of sentences that open a collection of Aldo Leopold’s writing: “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.”¹

Or rather, it was that simple assertion those two sentences boiled down to—I cannot live without wild things—that I had to agree with, at the same time knowing my embrace of that assertion would probably have been sneered at by Leopold, or at least dismissed as the ignorant remark of a suburbanite who can’t even identify all the trees in the neighborhood.² Loving their presence and feeling bereft at the sign of one being chainsawed down isn’t enough to qualify me as someone who truly appreciates the natural world—much less atone for the sins involved in using central air and heating or a computer or cell phone.

I don’t like my complicity in any of that, either—and the prevalence of all the gadgetry and its effects Leopold didn’t live to see has me carrying his understanding of “wild,” and his celebration-lamentation of it, a little further. It’s not, in other words, just the way in which citizens of the developed world are so far out of touch with “nature’s” functioning that we don’t even believe ourselves to be part of it or dependent on it. It’s also—and Leopold saw this even in the 1940s—that we’re apparently striving to escape our own species’ wildness: our own native unpredictability, fallibility, inefficiency, and yes and especially (and as ever), our own mortality. Forget about the logical extremes to which these desires lead, such as tech bros being determined to stay alive forever; the things we’ve gotten used to hearing as normal remarks on what we should expect from life, such as increased worker productivity, or GPS ensuring you get from point A to B in as little time as possible, unsurprisingly flow into the desire to have some nonhuman entity (AI) do both our tedious and our creative tasks for us. A more predictable life isn’t necessarily a bad thing; I’m far from celebrating a reality that involves being on constant watch for pirates or highway robbers or even simple power outages. But I’ve gotten the sense over the last few years that a solid chunk of the population would prefer being engineered out of their actual humanity, so that they can spend their time uninterruptedly watching and purchasing more or less the same stuff on some form of screen.³

Here’s the problem, though, with going down that rabbit hole of accusation: I start to develop the same tone that’s turning me off in Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. His under-a hundred-page reflection on monthly changes in flora, fauna, land, and water found on his Wisconsin farm involves careful and appreciative observation of what he seems to have considered fellow residents of the place he lived. And I cheer on Leopold’s hope that offering up descriptions of how beautiful and interesting “things natural, wild, and free” can be might convince an industrialized world that “our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs that it has lost the stability necessary to build them, or even turn off the tap.”⁴

It would admittedly be hard not to make blanket condemnations in a world that’s covering everything over in concrete (or tile)—but Leopold goes about his argument taking more than the occasional swipe at less refined humans, those who choose not to get up at 3:30 on summer mornings to listen to birdsong, or who, unable to afford to go out and buy a farm, are left unprotected from the “spiritual dangers” of “not owning” one.⁵ When he moved into another mini-round of comparative superiority over “at least 100,000” people” in cars “who have ‘taken’ what is called history, and perhaps 25,000 who have ‘taken’ what is called botany,” but who have no appreciation for the native Silphium, I had to put the book down and take a break. Not so much because I didn’t think he was right—but because that quotation-mark-enclosed “taken” carried such an air of derision for the sort of particular wild realities of human lives for which individuals can’t in some sense be faulted: a poor education about which you had no choice, or the fact that attempting to survive on metaphorical peanuts doesn’t give you the time or clear-headedness to pause and consider the Silphium. I also had to stop because I recognized in those scare quotes my own similar tendency to scorn the forces of evil shallowness with which we’re surrounded, and the hapless individuals and groups who don’t even realize they’re caught up in it.

When I set the book aside, I went back to another one I’d recently finished: Adam Shatz’s Writers and Missionaries, an exploration of the lives and work of authors and thinkers who’ve been important to Shatz.⁶ The title comes from a demand made by V. S. Naipaul, a writer with whom Shatz has some serious disagreement. But even though he finds much of what Naipaul says in an interview “predictably ugly,” he can’t shake the author’s assertion that you have to decide: “are you a writer, or are you a missionary?” The question, Shatz says,

was evoking the tension between a writer, who describes things as he or she sees them, and the missionary or the advocate, who describes things as he or she wishes they might be under the influence of a party, movement or cause…. the more closely you analyze a society, the more you allow yourself to see and to hear, the more you experience this tension.

Naipaul’s demand stays with Shatz as the latter relates moving from a position of the absolute certainty a young person has about anything he’s passionate about, but of which he has no direct experience—in this case, many a situation in the Middle East—to a more nuanced understanding, one more open to being altered, changed, shaken, by conversations and interaction with actual people in the actual place about which he’d once been so convinced. It’s not at all the type of uncultivation that Leopold’s talking about, but it is the sort of (maybe) human-specific wildness that we shut out by letting pundits and missionaries, whether economists, policy wonks, clergy, the good ol’ boy down the road, a bot, or even and especially our own unswerving assurance determine for us how things stand on a grand scale. And it’s also the sort of unsettled approach to existence that doesn’t take on the tone of injured righteousness and self-separation from the rabble that keeps breaking through Leopold’s depictions of woodcocks’ mating dances or his dog tracking anything he can scent.

The sort of project the conservationist is undertaking, though, is an extremely difficult one (a fact apparently acknowledged by his reference to “dilemmas” above), which requires walking that line between needed diagnosis, even alarm; presentation of a picture of what is and where it’s going; and the ability to let readers come to their own understanding about even a piece of it. The problem, I imagine, has only gotten thornier, as climate change becomes ever more serious, and as nothing seems to convince all that many of us of just how really, really serious it is. For someone writing about it all, how but take on the role of missionary, or at least doom-dealing prophet? And how do that without an artfully honed barb at so much wrong-headedness? If even yours truly—who can’t stop thinking about our boiling planet and about even the most futile-seeming ways I could contribute to bringing down the heat—gets prickly about Leopold’s approach, I can’t imagine what a climate change-denier would do with any of it.

The project and its purpose are entirely different, but I have to think of Michael Lesy’s beautifully strange Wisconsin Death Trip, a hefty collection of newspaper reports and photographs from one Wisconsin county in the last decade or so of the 1800s.⁷ Lesy very rarely steps in to provide some general background for each year’s reports—just enough to give us some context. But all the arson, murder, disease, crop failure, deaths of children, and more both speak to conditions most of us can no longer understand—while also encouraging us to consider how we’re still inescapably connected to it all. It’s a writerly project, in other words, not at all a missionary one. And it’s ten times as effective as Leopold’s depictions scattered with tiny jeremiads, even if we’re not being asked to do anything but ponder, probably with trepidation, what a certain reality might have entailed, and what we would do in the same or similar circumstances.

Bringing us to an understanding of what we’re doing to our world would not have been accomplished had Leopold gone the way of Lesy, merely presenting us with pictures of his plant-and-animal-packed reality, free from condemnation of TVs, cars, and the people who valued them. So in spite of all my kvetching, I don’t know what else the man should have done, especially at a time and in a place when at best, people might have heard (of) pleas for a better relationship with nature from Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau or John Muir. Can Aldo Leopold really speak to us today, when so much of what he described, including the “simpler” life available to him almost a century ago, has already disappeared? I think so—but maybe part of that ability to speak entails its helping us see how careful—how patient and even a bit merciful—we have to be in trying to share our own enthusiasms and convictions with others, at least if we really want anything to change.

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