Love and the Restoration of Ourselves

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.

The Farmer as Conservationist … and Restorationist

The farm lies about two hours away from the Shack but only historic inches away in concept. In the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin, it bears upon it some of the beautiful contoured crop swirls of Coon Valley, telltale marks of Leopold’s influence. New Forest Farm, started by Mark and Jen Shepard, is restoration agriculture in action. The farm asks the land to do what it is tailored by nature to do best and then trains it artfully, holistically, and prodigiously for personal, natural, and commercial use. From the sky, it looks like a child’s fingerpainting in green, with curlycues and waves of varying shades, dotted with treetop spheres, winding around ridges and swells. Lovely, biologically diverse, and drought resistant. It has pocket ponds with connective rain-irrigation swales cut into the contours following gradual lines of gravity to disperse captured moisture into the roots and soil for storage. In the face of the worst drought since 1933, this farm stood out lush and lively, though the chestnuts, hazelnuts, and fruit trees produced a reduced harvest, saving their energies for survival. On the spring day we visited, three new shaggy, fawn-colored Highland cattle had just arrived—a mother, son, and calf—along with some new solar-powered electric fencing for pasturing paddocks. “The animals get to know the whole thing,” says Peter Allen, the land manager in his early thirties who expounds on the sequential grazing of the cattle, pigs, sheep, chickens, and turkeys. “They stay for a day in the paddock, and they’re ready to move on to the next when we open the gates.” A PhD student from UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, Allen is applying precepts of wildlife and land ecology to the emerging field of restoration agriculture. He’s also a warm host and knowledgeable tour guide, handing out exciting details like the intoxicating cider made here.

The Wilderness Idea

It was supposed to be a day of short, easy paddles and portages. But that is before the winds show up, gale force and pummeling wave after wave against us, determined to lock us down on the island. We pull our three canoes laden with children and camping gear along the edges of the rocky shore to try to find an easier launching point. The teens then take steering positions, as we throw our shoulders into our paddles and dig, over, and over into those icy blasts of heavy, strong-armed water. Any lapse sends the canoe back. One slip of weight, and we’ll tip, losing all our gear, and we’ll have to struggle to stay alive against hypothermia, even in August. We’re tired. We’re cold. And we’re swearing against the powers that push at us, testing us. But we’re alive and we know it. We feel it in our bones and spirit like never at home. And we’re so darned grateful to be here. This is the wilderness. No directions came with this country—the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) between Minnesota and Ontario. They could have been so easily lost. In the 1930s and 1940s, Aldo Leopold, Sigurd Olson, and other lovers of the outdoors saw these granite-sheathed lakes for what they were—places of rugged beauty and unspoiled wild communities that once developed could not be recovered. They called a halt to unthinking “progress” for a chance to rest in what was and preserve it for the future. Leopold explained that “Recreation is valuable in proportion to the degree to which it differs from and contrasts with workaday life.” So if Leopold were here, what progress would he note on the wilderness front, where the waves of progress push so hard against the concept? First, he would have admired the persistence of his comrade Howard Zahniser from the Wilderness Society. How “Zahnie” patiently built partnerships over his ten years as secretary of the Society and then persevered for another nine crafting the Wilderness Act. He endured 65 drafts and all the associated lobbying of Congress.

The Shack, the Aldo Leopold Foundation, and Other Leopold Initiatives

The framed black-and-white photograph on my wall is entitled “The Temptation of David.” It captures a young woman perched on a stump, hiking boots dangling, wet hair and flowered cotton shirt and khakis slightly damp, holding an apple with one bite missing. Standing next to her is the David in question. Behind them is the Leopold Shack, easily recognizable to any who have been there. My husband-to-be, David Mataya, and I had just snuck back to the Shack, after a quick, crazy, unguarded dip in the river. I was young, in love with David and in love with Leopold (of whom I was writing a biography for children), and completely entranced by this piece of land so lovingly restored to its natural state. I have returned numerous other times. I came the spring after Nina had died, when I was working on a religious ecology project. I was hoping, like Art Hawkins, that it would help wake up people about the Judeo-Christian call from Genesis to care for this earth and all its creatures—which God had called “good”—and to help heal this world of many ecological wounds. The project had completely stalled, and like a pilgrim, I needed to stop at the Shack. I ended up in the sand near the river, weeping. The birds in all tones and rhythms calling from tree to tree, the multitude of different trees and bushes, the flowing river, and even the small draba called forth hope. I see the draba, in its small perennial patience, has proved right. In 2014, Pope Francis issued an encyclical, or major Catholic Church teaching, not just to Catholics, but to the world, on the religious, spiritual, social, ethical, and economic reasons on why our must change its ways, just as Leopold once did, but from the perspective of faith. And he has followed this up with visits to the United States Congress and the United Nations to emphasize the need to deal immediately with climate change.

The Land Ethic

Cooking my house specialty, New Mexican green chili, I heard the knock at the back door and dried my hands to open it for my expected guest. Shyly, the young man in the collar offered a bouquet of bright spring flowers and another gift, the golden- sunned paperback copy of A Sand County Almanac. “I thought you might like this—it’s a favorite of mine.” He had no idea how beloved this book was to me, or the author. In this small gesture, I felt like he was unintentionally offering me a concrete symbol of the growing bridge between the spiritual ethics of Aldo Leopold the naturalist and scientist, and his beloved wife, Estella, the devout Roman Catholic. Leopold had once noted that we would not ever come to integrating a land ethic into our American culture until churches and faith communities got involved. This obviously makes sense when you consider that only a small percentage of the nation, and indeed the world, possess a depth of scientific and/or ecological literacy. But in 2014, over 75% of Americans (and 84% worldwide in 2010) self-described themselves as having a religious affiliation. Another substantially growing group consider themselves spiritual, though not affiliated or have “fallen away” from their original religious practice. Scientific findings though rationally convincing often have less power to move people in their decision making, or perspectives, than faith. In the past, this has often led to land damage rather than health, but as shown by Pope Francis’s recent actions, this paradigm is shifting. Leopold was a student of the Bible, and he observed that the Mosaic Decalogue of the Ten Commandments dealt with humans’ relationships with each other in society. Leopold stated that the human ethical relationship to the land community was an evolving process, just as was human-to-human morality, mentioning the evolvement of human understanding that slavery is wrong. Leopold, in his “Land Ethic” essay, cited that leading thinkers in the Bible, the prophets (such as Ezekiel and Isaiah), urged deeper understandings.

The Endangered Species and Youth: Keeping All the Cogs and Wheels

I have something to show you. I just got it by overnight delivery.” My student’s face was a blaze of eagerness. From his backpack, he pulled out a small box. Seconds later, magically cupped in his hands was a tiny, neon lime green frog with black eyes. This was hardly the fare for a usual student–teacher appointment. But Blake Klocke is no ordinary university student, though he appears so—the same blue jeans and backpack uniform, laptop at the ready. The difference is not his red hair and freckles, but his amphibian excitement. On his laptop, he displayed for me dozens of frog-related book-marked websites, which he explained aglow with enthusiasm. He had been raising frogs since he was nine, being part of a rescue train across the world of hobbyists who have been keeping the genetic strains of frogs alive in their homes as they are being extinguished in the wilds. Zoos don’t have the space or the avid visiting publics to care about these small, diverse members of the living community, so without the care of personal frog lovers like Blake in raising captive-bred endangered amphibians, our world would have lost these strands of life’s web. The black-eyed tree frog is a critically endangered Central American species that is decreasing so rapidly that scientists predict it will be reduced by 80% in the wild in ten years by the life-sucking, zombie-like Chytrid fungus that is wiping out full populations. “Once my frogs have young, I can get you some so you can raise your own,” Blake offered, ready to convert me to the simple joys of amphibian care. Blake has experienced this excitement from his youth on, and his outdoors adventures have created a love in him that will carry him far— far beyond the lakes and wetlands near Eagan, Minnesota, where he first started catching tadpoles. This finding the “drama in the bush” is just what Leopold had been advocating in his classes, radio talks to young farmers, and writings about the sport of amateur naturalist studies.

Adios and Happy Trails

Leopold “wildlifer” Dan Thompson and his research partner were driving south on US Highway 51 on Thursday, April 22, 1948. “When the news of Aldo Leopold’s death came over the radio, we gasped and blankly looked at each other. I turned off the radio, and we drove on for another thirty minutes of silence.” Dan’s thoughts drifted back to the howl of a single wolf he had heard the evening before. He wondered “if the wolf had sensed the passing of a kindred spirit of the wilderness.” Aldo Leopold turned the American Dream upside down. He was born in a mansion and died at a shack; yet the Shack was the home of his greatest riches. Some have dubbed it the most famous chicken coop in the world. Upon his retirement, Aldo had planned to build a year- round home on the property, but instead the Shack was passed on as it was to new generations far beyond his family. Leopold’s book about the Shack and other adventures, “Great Possessions,” was in jeopardy after his death of ever getting published. But comments on the essays were called in from key students, friends, and family members, Luna served as the editor for his father’s writings, and the book was released by Oxford University Press under the title A Sand County Almanac and Sketches from Here and There (1949). In it, Aldo Leopold invited his readers to sit with him on his bench at the Shack, watch as he cut wood, walk with him in the woods and prairies, and loiter at his campfires to think about the question: How can we live on the land without spoiling it? And now even broader: How can we live as part of the earth, and its systems, without spoiling it? The urgency of his questions has only heightened since his death. Leopold anticipated our crises and left us the practical and philosophical wisdom to set our compasses and choose paths toward healthier vistas. Leopold reminded us in all his ecological work, “Pluck a petal from a pasque flower, and you disturb a star.”

The Professor: 1937– 1939

The windswept wastelands of the Dust Bowl made it clear to many Americans how fragile the human place in nature is. Suddenly, schools across the country wanted to teach conservation, erosion prevention, and wildlife management. Letters piled up on Leopold’s desk, asking his advice. Leopold replied with a list of resources, but his overriding message was that nature was the best teacher. At fifty-one, Leopold had seven graduate students and a full flock of undergraduates. With a blend of affection and awe, they called him “the Professor.” Marie McCabe, the wife of graduate student Robert McCabe, was quite surprised when she first met the Professor. “I had expected him to be a combination of Abe Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson. Here he was, extremely gracious, but of ordinary size and appearance, not at all handsome … showing no sign of being an author and absolute authority on everything.” Game Management 118 had become a campus favorite. Robert S. Ellarson, a Leopold wildlifer, recalled his first meeting: “The class had assembled before the Professor arrived. Soon the clicking of steel-cleated heels signalled his approach. When he arrived and stood before the class, I was impressed by the bold, virile, almost macho appearance of the man. And I was absolutely enthralled by the lecture that followed.” On Saturdays, the class traveled to the arboretum (which was slowly growing toward a natural state) or to various research plots. In the field, Leopold pointed out such elements as animal tracks and rubbings, scat, browsed plants, nests and burrows, gullies and runoff tracks, ground cover and foliage, and rock formations. Then he asked questions, pushing the students to put together the signs they had seen, to draw for themselves a recent and not-so-recent history of the plot of land: . . . Look at the trees in the yard and the soil in the field and tell us whether the original settler carved his farm out of prairie or woods. Did he eat prairie chicken or wild turkey for his Thanksgiving? What plants grew here originally which do not grow here now? Why did they disappear? What did the prairie plants have to do with creating the corn-yielding capacity of this soil? Why does this soil erode now but not then?. . .

The Land Laboratories: 1933– 1936

On June 26, 1933, the University of Wisconsin offered Aldo Leopold a position teaching the nation’s first graduate program in game management. The New York Times hailed it as the “one and only ‘wild-game chair.’” This was the chance he’d been waiting for. Despite the small salary, Leopold accepted. Letters of congratulation filled the mailbox at 2222 Van Hise. Among them was one from none other than the preservationist crusader W. T. Hornaday: …My Dear Ally, I salute the University of Wisconsin, for its foresight and enterprise in establishing the first Collegiate Professorship of Game Management created in the United States… . I congratulate the Wisconsin Alumni Foundation on its correct initiative in the choice of the Best Man for the new foundation… . It is all a helpful gesture in the struggle to save American game and sport from finally going over the precipice, A.D. 1940. …Leopold set up shop in “two small, rather dark rooms” in the basement of the university’s Soils Building. As an outsider to the academic establishment, he was expected to be more of a free-floating conservation resource for the state than a departmental teacher. He outlined some of his duties for the Milwaukee Journal: ...To conduct research in the life history of Wisconsin birds and mammals; develop cropping methods suitable for their preservation and increase; train men to devise and apply such methods; impart to other students a general understanding of the wild life conservation problem; assist farmers and other landowners in selecting and applying cropping methods; integrate game with other uses of land; and advise conservation officers on questions of wild life management and policy. …He was charged with giving radio talks and public addresses, overseeing soil erosion and game-cropping projects, and helping plan a university arboretum and wildlife refuge—all before the official teaching would begin. Since conservation was “a way of living on land” for Leopold, he wanted to involve as many people as possible.

Great Possessions: 1945– 1948

Soldiers returning from the war who longed to be a part of something life-affirming and “pure” rushed into the ranks of the wildlife profession. In the fall of 1945 and spring of 1946, the Professor’s classes were packed beyond his abilities to teach. He had to turn some students away. He relied more on Robert McCabe, sought additional assistants, and tried to reduce his outside commitments. But his national stature had grown to the point where he could not turn away some recognition and its attendant duties. He was elected honorary vice president of the American Forestry Association and president of the Ecological Society of America. Periodically, with increasing frequency and fury, pains exploded on the left side of Aldo’s face. It was like “somebody rising suddenly from behind a bush and bashing you with a sledgehammer.” The pain would stop him in midsentence. He had to shut his eyes and put pressure on the side of his face until the pain passed. Doctors diagnosed it as tic douloureux, or facial neuralgia, a swelling around one of the main facial nerves. They didn’t know what caused it or what to do about it. Aldo decided to wait and see if a summer’s ease at home and at the Shack would erase the pain and make surgery unnecessary. Ten years of work and affectionate tending had radically changed the landscape of the Shack. Nearly thirty thousand trees and shrubs thrived in patterns that were both random (never in rows) and intentional (the patches of flora fit the soils and the curves of the landscape). Overgrowth hid the river from view, pines defined parts of the land, and the experimental prairie had taken hold. As young Estella’s studies and social life began to envelop her, Aldo and Estella went to the Shack more and more as a twosome. Grandparents now, the Leopolds did get to babysit Bruce Carl Leopold that summer—the eldest child of Luna and his wife, Carolyn Clugston Leopold. For part of the time they took him to the Shack, and, as always, Aldo was able to relax, and his pains were somewhat relieved.