# Northern Arizona University/Environmental Ethics/Journals/New Found Hero

I think I have found a new hero. Aldo Leopold has written a beautiful piece of literature entitled "A Sand County Almanac". The more that I continue my reading the more I can understand the significance of our evolution as a species and some answers to questions that have puzzled me for quite some time. Toward the end of the book is where Leopold unveils the hidden meaning behind how man perceives the world. In his Land Ethic argument there is an interconnectedness that more often than not is overlooked and has become the problem of a lot of our environmental problems today. Keeping in mind that his book was published in 1949, there are concepts inside that are timeless.
He begins his book by chronicling each month of the year and what he learns about "nature". For this entry, I will offer my thoughts on the basic concepts of each month as I go through them.
January:
Here he talks about winter slowly breaking toward spring and what he discovers around the land in Wisconsin. There are tracks in the snow that show a skunk has emerged from hibernation and has begun his journey through another period of awakening. As the snow begins to slowly melt there are hidden tunnels beneath the top layer engineered by mice that has become noticeable from anyone (or anything) that sits above. What Leopold begins to explain is his observation of life'd revival toward a new season and a new year.
What I begin to notice while reading through the month of January is how the domino effect of life continues. The interesting point that I gather while I continue to read is that there doesn't seem to be an originating piece that has tip off this chain of events. More and more do I see a relation of one event or thing to another.
February:
In this chapter is where Leopold has really begun to open my mind. He talks about collecting wood for his furnace and the process of cutting a tree. Most people wouldn't think much below the surface when chopping down a tree or cutting one up into pieces small enough to fit inside of a wood furnace. He begins to explain how each motion of a saw goes back in time through a tree's rings. One can learn a lot from this process in a field called dendrology. Depending on the size of the ring one can see whether a drought or forest fire existed...in that year! As he continues through each year he relates it to events that were going outside of that tree such as when he says "We cut 1906, when the first state forester took office, and fires burned 17,000 acres in these sand counties; we cut 1905 when a great flight of goshawks came out of the North and ate up the local grouse (they no doubt perched in this tree to eat some of mine)."
The way he describes the relevance of each ring contained within a tree made me realize that there is wisdom not to be overlooked in the "land" of our world. Life did not start nor will it stop by our human ideas. Man's disconnect with the natural world is his assumed understanding of it. We DO want to think of things in a quantitative manner but unfortunately we have marginalized the qualitative aspects of our thinking. In my humble opinion, Plato was a genius at explaining the qualitative significance of the world in which we inhabit. Two concepts that have stuck with me are Plato's Allegory of the Cave and his interpretation of the Visible World vs. the Intelligible World.
March I will skip.
April:
In this month he explains how farms built upon riverbanks can be marooned by floods due to the melting of snow further upstream. He continues on to talk about how geese and birds react to the changing in the weather (and in particular with the floods) and begin their "claim" on the surrounding areas that other mammals and such do not have access to due their "floating" ability. It is not long into this text that he begins explaining the "battle" of brush fires that played an integral role in the prairies in the Wisconsin/Illinois area. Not until the arrival of a new animal, the settlers, was this process interrupted. The bur oak began taking over much of the prairie land because of man's intervention of the fires. He also goes on to talk about the dance of the woodcock in this time and brilliantly says "It is fortunate, perhaps, that no matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all of the salient facts about any one of them."
As I understand it, I begin to see that Leopold is admitting to himself that there are activities in the woods that don't necessarily need our understanding of it for it to exist. It's almost as if he is trying to rollback the argument of man's thinking especially when he says things like "Engineers did not discover insulation; they copied it from these old soldiers [bur oak trees] of the prairie war [the fires that raged throughout the prairie grasses]." Man would love to take credit for his understandings as if he created it. Thinking about this I am reminded of Benjamin Franklin. He did not "discover" electricity. I'm sure many before him had seen lightening in the sky yet because he puts his stamp of discovery on it he is now credited with this revolutionary element of our world. How often has man tried to take credit for something that preceded his understanding of it?
To be continued...