Lifelong Learning Together

On this sand farm in Wisconsin, first worn out and then abandoned by our bigger-and-better society, we try to rebuild, with shovel and axe, what we are losing elsewhere. It is here that we seek–and still find–our meat from God.

So Aldo Leopold introduced his series of “shack sketches,” arranged by season in A Sand County Almanac. The shack was a rehabilitated chicken coop on a worthless backwoods farm in a poor area of a Midwestern state. The sketches are Leopold’s observations and meditations as he works with his family each weekend to repair the damage to the land that forced the farm’s foreclosure, close readings of the Book of Nature.

Leopold, though, is one of the most perceptive readers that particular Book has had. Leopold earned a Masters degree in Forestry from Yale in 1909, worked for the Forest Service and as a surveyor of wildlife and game, and in 1933 became Professor of Game Management in the Agricultural Economics Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1935 he founded the Wilderness Society. And he brought all of this knowledge and experience to his family’s weekend hunting-shack projects.

Beginning in January, when “observation can be almost as simple and peaceful as snow, and almost as continuous as cold,” the Almanac explores the actions, interactions, and motivations of the community of creatures he encounters on the land, both human and wild. Along the way, his tour of the natural year touches on present joys and solitudes, the the untold tales of veteran trees, the secret glories of our fellow-creatures, knowledge and ignorance, the hiddenness of history, the nature of territory, the art of rivers, the wisdom of hunting dogs, and the wildness of wind, teaching us all the while to look again, with a deep and desperate love, at this wild garden that we have so long learned to ignore. He ends at last in November & December with meditations on the human values, biases, and choices which confront us all.

Aldo Leopold’s prose moves from poetry to scientific data to prophetic insight with breathtaking ease and the sharp brevity of parable. In a sketch for July entitled “Prairie Birthday,” he writes:

. . . indeed my whole neighborhood lies in a backwash of the River Progress. My road is the original wagon track of the pioneers, innocent of grades or gravel. . . . As between going fishing and going forward,¹ [my neighbors] are prone to prefer fishing. Thus on week ends my floristic standard of living is that of the backwoods, while on week days I subsist as best I can on the flora of the university farms, the university campus, and the adjoining suburbs. For a decade I have kept, for pastime, a record of the wild plant species in first bloom on these two diverse areas…

There then follows a table giving the number of species coming to first bloom in each month from April through September for each location, with a line at the bottom for “Total visual diet” in each location. Leopold concludes:

It is apparent that the backward farmer’s eye is nearly twice as well fed as the eye of the university student or businessman. Of course, neither sees his flora as yet….

Leopold’s passionate, personal engagement with his weekend woodlot allows him to see it deeply, and in his disciplined, care-full recording of his observations opens that vision to us as well.

But why should it matter that we should see the woods? Read More »