Aldo Leopold explained, in A Sand County Almanac, that he “purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever ‘written.’” Rather than being fixed, an ethic must evolve “in the minds of a thinking community.” As he wrote toward his tentative expression of possibility and necessity, Leopold was concerned not just about the primacy of utilitarian values in the United States, but also the inadequacies of dis-integrated thinking and living. Specialization encouraged fragmented recordings and understandings of human experience. He worried as well that the goals and definitions of science dealt “almost exclusively with the creation and exercise of power.” An unfinished manuscript and notes, published posthumously as the essay “Conservation,” offer his developing insights: “We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve, but to strive.”
The scope of America’s “thinking community” remains narrow. A democratic dream of individual liberties and rights hasn’t yet contributed to a “co-ordinated whole”—whether human, biotic, or the land. Danger lies in equating theory with practice, or ideal with committed action, as personal responsibility and respect for others, and for the land, can still be lost to lip service, disingenuous manners, and legislated gestures to an ideal.
Consider the words of a biologist writing on an environmental ethic today. “Our troubles,” E. O. Wilson observes in The Diversity of Life, “arise from the fact that we do not know what we are and cannot agree on what we want to be. The primary cause of this intellectual failure is ignorance of our origins.” “Humanity is part of nature,” he continues, “a species that evolved among other species. The more closely we identify ourselves with the rest of life, the more quickly we will be able to discover the sources of human sensibility and acquire the knowledge on which an enduring ethic, a sense of preferred direction, can be built.” Perhaps danger lies most basically in not recognizing who and what we are.
• • •
I pored through my father’s shelves after reading Alien Land that first year at Princeton, concentrating on books he’d marked. On Being Negro in America. Black Skin, White Masks. The Fire Next Time. Anger, and Beyond. These writings showed me that no question, no fear, no anger or shame was unique to me or my time. Still, all of it was achingly personal to each writer. I remember drawing slight comfort in knowing others before me had shared doubt, confusion, or worse. I also recall what at first seemed a bottomless fear-fright once I realized the vicious persistence of human ugliness.
Not long ago I came upon an old box of words my father had packed and sealed before his death. Stacked within it were brittle and yellowed novel manuscripts, journals, decades of letters and photographs, and this newspaper clipping of an ad he had placed:
Monday, March 2, 1959
San Francisco Chronicle
WANTED TO RENT
NEGRO Account Executive and
published novelist; wife, operating room
supervisor, wish to live as human beings
in San Francisco. Seek unprejudiced
landlord to make desirable apt. rental
without regard to race. QUIET IS ALL
IMPORTANT. Need 3 to 4 rooms plus
modern kitchen, bath, minimum 9-12 mo.
lease in $100 mo. range. Call OL3-8242,
10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.
I’ve long wondered what a child inherits from a parent, within and beyond the strain of blood—and beyond bitterness and silence lining adolescent memories. Did I overhear or imagine Dad say how he hated the America that believed its lies?
Another ninth-grade summer text was Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, a survivor of Auschwitz and other Nazi camps who became a leading psychiatrist in postwar Europe. I became obsessed by the last two sentences of his 1959 book: “Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who has invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who has entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.” Frankl believed that “each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.” He added that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way” and thus “evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency.”
What did Frankl’s words of choice mean for an adolescent, for her generation? Could one choose between ignorance and innocence in such a world? In the passing years I began to doubt any emergence from a “state of latency,” doubted whether Americans as a whole could choose to answer these questions broadly: What and whom do you love and respect? To what and whom are you responsible, obligated? Respect, from the Latin respicere, the willingness to look again. Responsibility, the ability to respond, the capacity to attend, to stand behind one’s acts. Conscience, from the Latin conscientia, a joint knowledge or feeling, from conscire (com-, together with, and scire, to know). If obligations have no meaning without conscience, without an acceptance of moral responsibility, what is possible?
Fourteen years before A Sand County Almanac and Alien Land went to print, in a decade defined by the Depression and the Dust Bowl, Aldo Leopold and his family began to restore abandoned, “worn out” farmland along the Wisconsin River near Baraboo. They planted native prairie grasses, wildflowers, shrubs and, eventually, many thousands of trees. This was the sand county whose seasonal cycles of life and death the “almanac” celebrated. This was land that felt both familiar and welcoming one recent October dawn, when I took a worn path to that river’s edge to watch the sun rise over the downstream horizon. The gift of time by these waters came from the Aldo Leopold Foundation. On the Wisconsin River’s sand plain, a fourteen-year-old’s questions met the clearest-yet responses.
I could imagine it possible to refrain from dis-integrated thinking and living, from a fragmented understanding of human experience on this continent. Possible to refuse what alienates and separates. To see in fugitive pieces the forces that have shaped the land and ourselves in it. Of course, there is always a danger of fooling myself. But if it is possible, then perhaps a larger sense of who we are as interconnected ecological, cultural, and historical beings could begin to grow. For if the health of the land is its capacity for self-renewal, then the health of the human family could, in part, be an intergenerational capacity for locating ourselves within many inheritances: as citizens of the land, of nations even within a nation, and of Earth. Democracy lies within ever widening communities.
Questioned by life we are held to account. Aldo Leopold and my father never met in their lifetimes. I want alien land and land ethic to meet and answer to each other in ours.
Postscript
There will be many readers who will be contented with the charming nature vignettes and the attractive illustrations, closing [A Sand County Almanac] hurriedly when they discover the knotty philosophical problem in the last part. That will be a pity, for these ideas were the man’s life, and because of them we can place this book on the shelf that holds the writings of Thoreau and John Muir.
—J. W. H., San Francisco Chronicle (November 27, 1949)
Alien Land, by Willard Savoy . . . is written with passion and with anger, so that it has a vitality which makes it linger in the mind. Reduced to its simplest terms it is the story of a man’s loss of the sense of personal dignity, a loss