Second Nature

Your question makes one think seriously about the world's status in the longer term. In the past decade, we suddenly have become startlingly aware of the contemporary threats to our environment. Who can help but be alarmed at the combination of environmental deterioration and exploitation, the astonishing magnitude of threats of nuclear destruction, planetary change, and civil mayhem, and the inability of governmental systems to provide sensible answers? Yes -- environmentalism is merging into survivalism.

There are surely some happy and positive developments of my father's concepts in Baraboo and surrounding areas. I'm thinking of the statewide Leopold Weekend that began with the Lodi community's reading of A Sand County Almanac; the wonderful program of Jeff Nania in the River Crossing Charter School in Portage; the exciting, innovative programs of Kathe Conn and the Aldo Leopold Nature Center in Monona; and the emergence of Farming and Conservation Together as a local program to protect and restore wetlands in the Baraboo River watershed. These are such good developments. The extent of volunteerism in the community when the Leopold pines were thinned just this last year was happy evidence of real interest in the community.

Environmentalist communities are still not able to effectively reach the American public about the importance of a relationship with the natural landscape. There are clusters of Americans who feel keenly about the issue, many of whom fashion their lives around caring for our habitat. But the minimal attention of our political system toward caring for our land seems to say that our voters are not really concerned with the environment -- whether it is in the wider landscape or in the centers of humanity. It seems so strange that as a group we can care about having a clean car, or having an orderly house, or keeping the lawn mowed, but be reckless about caring for the earth that sustains us.

Many people ask about the religious views of Aldo Leopold. We all are impressed with his keen knowledge of the Bible and his frequent use of biblical lines in his writing. It is clear to me that he had a beautiful reverence for the natural world; he wrote, "It is here that we seek and still find our meat from God." But this reverence was very personal, and not a bit organizational. I doubt if he ever stepped into any church in his life. I have often said that his ethical focus on human behavior was one of following a guiding principle -- a guiding star of how to live ethically. His way of living seems to me to be so simple and so beautiful. For me it seems clearly based on love and affection for the natural world and a disregard for gimmicks and "improvements." Stand quietly in front of our family's shack, and you should feel the sense of love that he wrote about so beautifully.

The "green" movement is a healthy and positive force that is gathering momentum around the nation. The problem of how to get more people to catch the enthusiasm for it is great, as it has to compete with the big-moneyed major sports, the toys of the electronic age, and the separation of so many of our young people from the natural world. On the other hand, I am always surprised to find that the students in the local school here have a lot of enthusiasm for natural values. The beginnings of a real green movement are there. The big need is to nurture it.

The essay on "The Good Oak" is such a wonderful one. It reaches people in so many different ways. The event of the oak tree being struck down was in about 1947, when I was in graduate school, so I was not present. It is probable that my father was very pleased with the essay; my sister Nina tells me he called his friend Joe Hickey when he had finished it and said that he would like to read it to him. That was unusual. One of the aspects of that essay that has such strong appeal is the very simplicity of a valuable tree, a family cutting it for fuel, a mother (the "chief sawyer" who was concerned with the exertion involved), and this as a foil for reciting a sequence of historical events. Cutting firewood was a continuous winter task at the shack. In the winter days, Dad used to laugh, saying, "I think that we burned more firewood this week than we cut."

The Tropical Forestry Initiative is an effort to study the technique that might be used to restore tropical rainforest. We started planting native trees in abandoned pastures in 1992, and our fastest-growing trees have been averaging more than two meters [6.5 feet] of growth per year. So after 10 years, our trees were over 20 meters [65.6 feet] high! And after the trees closed in their crowns, a wonderful array of undergrowth species has been coming in naturally. We have identified over 500 species of undergrowth in our new developing forest. To say that it is exciting is an understatement.

The Greensprings Natural Cemetery is an exciting new direction for being a part of the natural world. We have been in business since early last year, and the idea of returning our bodies to the natural world generates a great positive reaction. The cemetery is in a beautiful setting, 100 acres of rolling terrain, partly forested, a sweeping view of the glaciated hills to the south. It is so rewarding to attend burial services and hear people repeating again and again how wonderful it was to bring their loved ones to such a beautiful place, for the very natural act of bringing their bodies to the clean natural world. No chemicals, no carved stone, no monoculture of mowed grass. You can be sure that I purchased my own plot at the very onset of the program.