Land Use Policy

Albert Hochbaum, whom we met in Chapter 3, was Leopold’s student and friend; Director of the Delta Duck Station in Manitoba, Canada; and a part-time collaborator on A Sand County Almanac. He also had an admirable talent for succinctly hitting the nail on the head. He summed up Leopold’s message in four words. “The lesson you wish to put across is the lesson that must be taught,” he said, “preservation of the natural.” So much for succinctness; the difficult problem, of course, is to explain what is meant by “preservation” and by “natural.” Thomas McNamee, writing forty years later, uses the same basic approach: “I believe that the true object of conservation is nature,” he says. “What is nature?” The answer cannot help but be complicated, he notes, because “our conception of nature springs from the darkest depths of our culture’s unconscious sense of life itself, and ancient irrational urges and fears give the concept its power.’” But that is only half of the story: “At the same time,” he says, “nature must also have an objective, rational, manageable, thinkable value.” And thus we have the paradox of modern land use theory: Americans love nature; our values were formed in nature’s womb, a huge, wonderful, and horrible wild place. Our values are freedom and independence, “split rail values,” as Leopold called them. But our activities, as builders and consumers, transform our environment into something not-wild; we manipulate and control and artificialize nature; we make it not-nature. As the song says, you always hurt the one you love. But the paradox has also an optimistic face: As we have built and consumed, we have become wealthy by exploiting nature. Wildness has become valuable, objectively, according even to economists, because our wealthy society is now willing to pay to preserve nature. But here is the bitter pill to swallow: We all must admit that, at least in some sense, “nature” preservation is a sham—we’ve gone too far to “free” nature, as we might free a wild animal, release it from captivity.