One feeding station is worth a dozen sermons on the love of nature.
– Aldo Leopold, Wisconsin Public Radio talk, “Feeding Winter Birds”
Feeding birds is almost synonymous with cultivating a knowledge of and affection for the most local forms of wildlife. Feed birds and you effortlessly become better acquainted with your avian neighbors while automatically developing healthily partisan biases in favor of certain species. And compared to most forms of nature-based recreation, it is a practice that rewards staying at home more than constant locomotion. Now, the “technical” aspects of birdfeeding are dealt with over at our store website – how to stop squirrels, avoid feeding rodents, and the nuts and bolts of what foods, feeders, and so on to offer in order to attract a greater variety of birds. What I’m inaugurating today is a more philosophically-inclined series on illustrious persons who fed birds – and found in that activity valuable insight into how to live most happily with nature. That is, after all, my fundamental goal.
Today’s first entry discusses Aldo Leopold, “the father of American wildlife conservation,” longtime University of Wisconsin professor, and author of A Sand County Almanac. Although the word “professor” is one easily-applied label, one of the key things about his work and philosophy is that it is rooted in practical experience rather than academic theory: he worked for many years in the Forest Service, where he was able to judge the gap between what was done and what he felt should be done, and then for even longer he managed his own piece of land in the sand counties of Wisconsin, an unending education in a personal sense of land husbandry. One minor part of that husbandry was supporting his local songbirds.
I once counted bird houses visible from the highway and found that only 12 farmsteads out of 100 had bird houses. Did the owners of the other 88 have so much pleasure already that they needed no more? Or were they so preoccupied with big troubles as to forget about small birds? I’ll leave you to guess.
– “Bird Houses,” published in For the Health of the Land
Leopold’s writing crosses between several genres, from descriptive natural history sketches, to practical advice to landowners, to reasoned arguments in favor of revised agricultural or wildlife management policies, to deep philosophical engagement with our underlying relationship with the land. This last mode is most famously represented by his essay on “The Land Ethic” in his masterpiece A Sand County Almanac, in which he proposes the health and dignity of the land as the next party to be included in the long historical expansion of our ethical conscience, from its prehistorical origins through biblical commandments up to modern human rights and democratic society. But even at his most philosophical, Leopold’s argumentation is always eloquently rooted in his personal experience, making him an ideal starting point for my exploration of the connections between our fundamental personal philosophies, our awareness of our natural surroundings, and what Leopold described with characteristic reserve as “our manner of wasting weekends.”
The Varieties of Outdoor Recreation
Today, I particularly want to think about Leopold’s essay entitled “Conservation Esthetic,” also found in A Sand County Almanac, which deals directly with the central concern of this whole Nature in Novato endeavor: how and why should we pursue outdoor recreation? (All further quotes below are from this essay unless otherwise noted.) I strongly encourage you to read the whole essay, either online here, or by checking out A Sand County Almanac from the library and getting its whole rich context (we have a copy in our store lending library too).
Many of the forces Leopold identified as arrayed against the spread of a Land Ethic in broader society remain as difficult to combat now as when he was writing in the 1940s: agriculture and extractionary industries are inclined to focus on short-term profits, government policies prioritize economic growth, and the broader citizenship has generally ceded influence over land use decisions to these impersonal forces due to a combination of practical necessity, lack of knowledge, and an imbalance of political power compared to organized interests. But for now let’s focus with Leopold on one area: “outdoor recreation.” What would a sustainable land ethic look like here? And does the practice of outdoor recreation lead to the development of such an ethic?
Barring love and war, few enterprises are undertaken with such abandon, or by such diverse individuals, or with so paradoxical a mixture of appetite and altruism, as that group of avocations known as outdoor recreation. It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature. But wherein lies the goodness, and what can be done to encourage its pursuit? On these questions there is confusion of counsel, and only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.
The first thing for any advocate of simply “getting people outdoors” to recognize is that people’s outdoor activities are diverse and often contain a mixture of “appetite and altruism.” Compared to alternative indoor pursuits, there’s usually some promotable goodness in most outdoor activity, but there is usually also an admixture of other appetites which may be neutral or even harmful as far as conservation goes. The fact of taking place outdoors does not unfortunately ensure an activity’s practical good consequences or the practitioner’s perfectly developed sense of responsibility towards the land.
Equally conscientious citizens hold opposite views on what [outdoor recreation] is and what should be done to conserve its resource-base. Thus the Wilderness Society seeks to exclude roads from the hinterlands, and the Chamber of Commerce to extend them, both in the name of recreation…. Such factions commonly label each other with short and ugly names, when, in fact, each is considering a different component of the recreational process.
Different eras and areas have a different balance between different recreational interests. Here we sometimes see “short and ugly” names thrown around between factions including “radical environmentalists,” “selfish NIMBYs,” the “bike lobby,” “dog people,” “cat people,” and so on. It can make Leopold’s taxonomy of outdoor recreation seem blessedly unfractious. The hunters had some organized representation, but otherwise he was able to consider the components of outdoor recreation simply as interests present in varying degrees across the population, rather than as fiercely committed factions. What were people fundamentally looking for when they went outdoors? Leopold came up with five components:
- Trophy hunting
- Fresh air and change of scene
- Isolation in nature
- Perception of natural processes and communities
- A sense of husbandry
In his analysis, these five components existed in a scale or hierarchy, with some elements deemed lower or higher than others. What determines “higher”? His own elitist, anti-democratic, capricious personal preferences? Leopold is concerned with the preservation of the richest recreational opportunities that go along with the richest ecological communities: activities which consume, dilute, or damage these communities are lower and should be discouraged or at least deprioritized compared to the higher, less consumptive, more truly creative and publicly enriching components.
The lower components, which take up most of our economic energies:
- Trophy hunting
- Direct hunting of animals
- Indirect trophies, such as photographs (and presumably bird sightings)
- Fresh air and change of scene
Leopold was a hunter, but he saw how land management for hunters’ interests, narrowly conceived, was often harmful, most notably in the extirpation of large predators to increase numbers of game species while causing longer-term ecological impoverishment. The interests of photographers and the “fresh air” crowd are relatively resilient to mass use and so we continue to promote their access – they don’t in themselves lose their value as sites grow more heavily used – but engineering to increase their access doesn’t actually create any value and contributes to the “recreational stampede” which can cause other harmful effects while impeding the realization of the higher forms of outdoor recreation.
A higher component, which is directly reduced with every step we take to promote the first two:
- Isolation in nature
This doesn’t simply mean “exclude the people!” It means preserving fully undeveloped wilderness, without roads or amenities. In the context of this essay on forms of outdoor recreation, this translates to “isolation” for a human, but preserving such wildlands obviously also has value for the natural community of plants and animals. For Leopold, the biggest factor here is the proximity of roads: truly wild areas (he admits that perhaps 90% of our land will be developed to some degree or another) should be accessible by backpacking, or canoeing, or perhaps by pack train, all of which preserve in his mind a much richer experience than one enabled by motors and mediated by civilization, its comforts, and its gadgets.
The goals of real “recreational development”:
- Perception of natural processes and communities
- A sense of husbandry
Perception of evolutionary development and ecological interactions can emerge from what is somewhat simply and artificially labelled “nature study.” Increasing perceptiveness does not consume or dilute resources; it is not reliant on solitude or exotic scenery; it is not fundamentally advanced by building roads and campgrounds. Leopold is very definite: this is the goal and the real work to be done.
To promote perception is the only truly creative part of recreational engineering.
Recreation is not the outdoors, but our reaction to it.
It is the expansion of transport without a corresponding growth of perception that threatens us with qualitative bankruptcy of the recreational process. Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.
When a high degree of perception is present in a landholder or administrator of public lands, it can lead to husbandry, or caring for the land in a way that observes Leopold’s Land Ethic, with care “to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.” Today, there is greater awareness of how suburban landholders can care for their land in a small way (plant and encourage diverse native plants, minimize pesticide use, support backyard wildlife) and greater opportunities for individuals to participate in the care of public lands (volunteer opportunities to work in habitat restoration abound: see for example Marin Audubon, Hamilton Wetlands, Marin Open Space, the GGNRA, OneTam).
Promoting Perception
So we know how to develop access to the outdoors, but how do we develop our reaction to it? Many conservation organizations today include some form of public nature education as part of their agenda, due in part to Leopold’s influence. Participation in outdoor recreation as organized and encouraged by these groups presumably does encourage some people to “vote right” or to donate money. But if the most ambitious claims of nature education proponents (such as myself) are to be believed, then spending time in nature should lead to ways of thinking that take one outside of the dictates of marketing, propaganda, dogma, social convention, and established habits to engage with the underlying realities of our relationship to the land and the plants and animals that inhabit it. Clear thinking rather than an alternative indoctrination. Can nature recreation really achieve this?
That’s a big ask. I believe it can. It was Leopold’s actual experiences out of doors that formed his philosophy. My experiences out of doors have shaped mine. But that it inevitably will do so is a much different matter, depending, as Leopold notes, on which components of the recreational experience are practiced. While many forms of outdoor recreation exert some influence on our thinking, most stop well short of the fundamental ethical re-evaluation that Leopold envisioned. If an activity is capable of being sponsored, marketed, or publically promoted, it will almost by definition be an activity that is compatible with an economically-established human orthodoxy of one kind or another. Leopold’s big picture aspirations went further, hoping that time spent with things “natural, wild, and free” would lead us past our tribal identity with narrowly-focused factions and towards a clear-eyed reckoning with the fundamental economic dogmas which he felt were at the root of our conflicts with the land.
Now we face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free… We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not.
… Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.
Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free.
– Preface to A Sand County Almanac
Take “trophy hunting,” to consider how one form of outdoor recreation might affect our ways of thinking. Leopold includes under this title both the potentially more ecologically disruptive activity of real hunters and their supporters in land management, and the indirect hunters who seek other certificates of achievement, such as photographs or sightings of rare warblers:
Trophy-hunting is the prerogative of youth, racial or individual, and nothing to apologize for.
The disquieting thing in the modern picture is the trophy-hunter who never grows up, in whom the capacity for isolation, perception, and husbandry is undeveloped, or perhaps lost. He is the motorized ant who swarms the continents before learning to see his own back yard, who consumes but never creates outdoor satisfactions. For him the recreational engineer dilutes the wilderness and artificializes its trophies in the fond belief that he is rendering a public service.
Tough words for the bird listers. And he doesn’t stop there:
[A botanist or birdwatcher,] because his kind of hunting seldom calls for theft or pillage, disdains the killer… And why does [he] call himself a conservationist? Because the wild things he hunts for have eluded his grasp, and he hopes by some necromancy of laws, appropriations, regional plans, reorganization of departments, or other form of mass-wishing to make them stay put.
Ouch! Now, there’s a broad spectrum of birdwatchers out there. Probably every one of them would resent being labelled with this full broadside. I’m definitely not personally laying all of these charges on all birders. But I claim a philosophical temperament and general alignment with the old Socratic practice of self-examination, so I can’t help but read this essay and ask myself to what degree these descriptions apply to me. If you consider yourself an enlightened conservationist and eager seeker of new birds or plants or trails, I think it’s worth periodically contemplating the questions embodied in Leopold’s assessment:
- Does your trophy hunting ever turn you into a “motorized ant” who swarms the continents before learning to see your own backyard, one “whose recreation is mileage”? (And if you think you know your own backyard – broadly speaking – reading the first half of A Sand County Almanac about Leopold’s experiences on his Wisconsin farm gives a good illustration of what such knowledge could look like in depth.)
- Do you consume but never create outdoor satisfactions? (And in the modern age of globalized environmental ills, this has to also include your proportional contribution to the impacts of consumerism, resource extraction, land use changes due to suburbanization or agriculture, and climate change.)
- Do you encourage, endorse, or celebrate when the recreational engineer dilutes the wilderness and artificializes its trophies on your behalf? (Compare your “difficult” and “easy” trophies of outdoor experience – whatever your personal scale might be. Were the difficult ones more rewarding? Do you spend more time chasing less rewarding, but more abundant “easy trophies”? Why don’t you chase more difficult ones? Do you see society spending more energy enabling “easy trophies” or preserving the existence of difficult ones?)
- Do you disdain the hunter who kills his trophies while celebrating your own (non-lethal) certificates of achievement? (These might be birds on a list, photographs taken, or destinations visited. Remember also that most hunters eat the animals they kill, while the average American eats animals raised and killed in often decidedly less agreeable ways.)
- Does your primary conservation activity consist in hopes that “some necromancy of laws, appropriations, regional plans, reorganization of departments, or other form of mass-wishing” will make things better? (Do your hopes or complaints lead to any positive action? Is the actual conduct of your life consistent with the world you say you would like to see? For instance, do you think that climate change is a serious issue and that we should be phasing out fossil fuel transportation (a fairly common form of “mass-wishing”), but still blithely go about driving and flying for distances incompatible with such policies? Hence the need for some “necromancy” to reconcile the wishing and reality.)
Tough questions. If they were easy and comfortable rather than disquieting, Leopold’s book wouldn’t be so compelling. He does offer an alternative to trophy-hunting, motorized antdom, and vain mass-wishing, though not necessarily one that is widely inviting, glamorous, convenient, or compatible with existing habits and orthodoxies. It’s the same old saw that has been promoted by philosophers for thousands of years and allied with conservationist goals at least since Thoreau: consume less, travel less, appreciate where you area. Goûter la lenteur, apprécier notre territoire (savor slowness; appreciate your place), as contemporary de-growther Serge Latouche has it. And perception-fostering outdoor recreation is a potential key to changing your ways of thinking.
The only true development in American recreational resources is the development of the perceptive faculty in Americans. All of the other acts we grace by that name are, at best, attempts to retard or mask the process of dilution.
Let no man jump to the conclusion that Babbitt must take his Ph.D. in ecology before he can ‘see’ his country… Perception… cannot be purchase with either learned degrees or dollars; it grows at home as well as abroad, and he who has a little may use it to as good advantage as he who has much. As a search for perception, the recreational stampede is footless and unnecessary.
No, it’s not easy to accept that degrees or dollars or foreign travel are all counterproductive in the search for this kind of perception. Most levels of society say otherwise, from the more obvious interested parties (commercial marketing), to endlessly repeated truisms (government or educational propaganda), to their repetition in the words, thoughts, and actions of a seeming majority of the people around us in this affluent part of the world. If you want to increase your natural perception by learning about birds, the conventional wisdom advises you to take this class, buy these books, travel on these guided tours, and make sure you are well-supplied with the best equipment. Many of these things will help you to see and identify more birds. It’s true.
But in Leopold’s account of outdoor recreation, the key point is that “more” is not necessarily “better” (nor are “bigger” or “faster”). “The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods” when it comes to increasing perception. There are many gadgets and marketed commodities and services that interfere with this development more than they help. There are also a few, by no means obligatory but comparatively inexpensive, that can assist it: a simple field guide, a pair of binoculars, a bird house or some judiciously offered sunflower seeds.
A good feeding station is the best of classrooms for learning ornithology.
– “Feed the Songbirds,” published in For the Health of the Land
In this classroom, tuition is cheap and the commute is easy, though no diplomas or trophies are awarded. In contrast, the high-mileage, highly commercialized forms of outdoor recreation are less incitements to learning than they are additional manifestations of the broader commercialization of everything that Leopold laments and holds complicit in ecological loss:
Our grandfathers were less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by which they bettered their lot are also those which deprived us of pigeons. Perhaps we now grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts, that we have gained by the exchange. The gadgets of industry bring us more comforts than the pigeons did, but do they add as much to the glory of the spring?
– “On a Monument to the Passenger Pigeon”
Finding diminishing returns in material gains is a recurrent theme in ecological thought. The alternative is greater simplicity of means, made more enticing and indeed preferable by greater perceptiveness. What is particularly valuable in Leopold’s work is only dimly reflected in this summary of some of his conclusions; the bulk of his writing focuses not on the mental destination he reaches, but the process by which he reaches it. For him, this process is not primarily the result of abstract argumentation, but of his personal experience. Changes in attitudes towards outdoor recreation and towards land use decisions in general will only be permanent and reliable when they are based not merely on a technical calculus, but are rooted in our internal preferences.
Wildlife education is no separate thing; it is part and parcel of land-education, and of social philosophy… This face-about in land philosophy cannot, in a democracy, be imposed on landowners from without, either by authority or by pressure groups. It can develop only from within, by self-persuasion, and by disillusionment with previous concepts. Shortcuts like conservation text books, and conservation programs in youth organizations, help if they are sound and honest, but they are microscopic fractions of a deep and slow process.
– “Planning for Wildlife,” published in For the Health of the Land
This is a measured perspective on how philosophical change occurs, and what can realistically be done to encourage or steer such evolution. Attempts to promote perception in outdoor recreation can likewise help, if they are “sound and honest,” but they are but small fractions in a long process of self-persuasion. Practically speaking, the efforts which focus on an individual’s lived experience rather than gadgets, mileage, or trophies, and that enable personal action rather than the mere passive hearing of sermons will have a greater long-term effect.
One feeding station is worth a dozen sermons on the love of nature.
Aldo Leopold wrote some of the most eloquent sermons on nature that we have. But he is right to note that such words are usually but “microscopic fractions” towards an about-face in land philosophy. A new opportunity for real life experience – like that feeding station – might equal a dozen such fractions. And it is ongoing practice, day after day, that will add up to a whole.
Header photo from the Aldo Leopold Foundation via this High Country News story.
Another fantastic essay Jack! Thank you!
Thank you Maggie!