A little girl in Raytown, Missouri, used to spend part of almost every day in a special place in the woods near her house. The place had a calming effect on her. “Sometimes I go there when I’m mad . . . and then, just with the peacefulness, I’m better. I can come back home happy, and my mom doesn’t even know why.” In his book Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv recounts the end of this fifth grader’s story. “And then they just cut the woods down. It was like they cut down part of me.” I know this same feeling. When I was her age, I watched the prairiesavannah I loved to explore turned into a housing development, chasing away my friends, the meadowlarks. I watched my aging Irish poet friend, Ken Olsen, try to fight the city to save the little bit of woods next to his house from being turned into an apartment complex. The loss nearly gave him a heart attack … or it did give him one, just not one that could be seen. Another friend mourned for weeks after the city cut down the oak in front of her apartment complex that offered dappled green shade to her fourth-floor home. It’s grief, pure and simple. But with all grief, life goes on, sometimes even when we don’t want it to. And there’s hope in that. The land systems long to rejuvenate, just as we long to have them back. Leopold’s restoration work at the Shack and the Arboretum have expanded exponentially, into every ecosystem on land and even into ocean ecosystems, such as coral reefs, kelp beds, tidal communities, and oyster beds. Because so much damage has been done, this is one of the most vibrant, growing, and needed areas of the Leopold legacy. Steven Brower, a landscape architect and Leopold family historian from Burlington, often walks the woods, caves, and bottomlands where Aldo roamed as a child. Brower’s eyes penetrate the landscapes with a kind of x-ray vision, seeing what once was underneath what is today.
Detrital production in Nova Scotian kelp beds: patterns and processes
