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An Essay for Earth Day
Morning dawns clear wet and cool in the Flint Creek Valley, a few miles west of the Mississippi River in the southeastern corner of Iowa. I have spent the night here sleeping in the van after yesterday’s concert, serenaded by the calls of night creatures and passing freight trains in the distance. I am just outside the hometown of Aldo Leopold, the famous conservationist and native Burlingtonian.
Starr’s Cave used to be a farm, home to the inquisitive Leopold children a century ago. The cave, extending several hundred feet in the only-one-of-its-kind limestone formation, is filled with a variety of migrating bat species as well as ghosts of train robbers and legends of the Underground Railroad. The floodplain woods and wildflowers below the limestone cave were a formative force on the minds, morality and ethics of the young Iowans.
On Earth Day morning 2006 I sit, boiling coffee and journaling on this hallowed ground for one of our most respected outdoor ethicists. Though this is Des Moines County and not the Wisconsin Sand that he made famous, here there are redbuds in their fullest glory, spring flowers abound in the meadows and forest floor, and the evening chorus of owl and coyote give way to the screams and laughs of children and their adult companions, giggling with wonder at the flora and fauna along the trail. Their footsteps run next to a pretty little creek, neatly adorned with official signs of its unsuitability for human contact due to high bacteria counts, a byproduct of Iowa’s industrial agriculture empire.
A few miles away I hear the freight trains and barges following the once mighty Mississippi, now a chain of lakes for over a thousand miles, dammed and controlled for purposes of navigation and to alleviate flooding of the once richly fertile bottom lands where now the permanently settled try to defy nature. The poisons accumulate and are released only rarely, when the great river escapes its concrete and riprap prisons and spreads over the land. The whole mess is carried to those unfortunate enough to live downstream:
Indiscriminate
Complete
Nutrients and pesticides from the last decade of growing seasons
Tires
Trailers
The big river moves them all until its anger subsides, and we are left to contemplate the extent of its wrath, and instead of asking, “why do we keep doing this to ourselves ”, we ask “how can we stop it from doing this again?”
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Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a good shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree—and there will be one. If his back be strong and his shovel sharp, there may eventually be ten thousand. And in the seventh year he may lean upon his shovel, and look upon his trees, and find them good. - Aldo Leopold |
Leopold, Muir, Carson, Abbey and others like them called our attention to the traps we were laying for ourselves and our children a half century ago. Surely they would deem us lunatics for continuing so many blind follies. They understood innately that an owl is not just an owl, but a vital organ in a greater system – one unimaginably complex yet simple enough to grasp the perils in pulling organs out and expecting the whole to function as usual. That we have made many progresses in this last half century, and particularly since the first Earth Day in 1970, is undeniable, and the state of our understanding of our planet’s workings and mysteries has also increased immeasurably. But in the face of the mounting evidence that we must do more, we do not change – as a whole we seem to prefer the ostrich to the owl – burying our heads in the sand and hoping that it will all work out, as long as we get the kids to soccer on time, finish that huge project at work on time and under budget, and the chocolate squares baked and ready just in time for the after church coffee hour. Can it not be possible that we are fouling the very temple the Good Lord built for us? Is it unfathomable that we are supposed to steward the earth, and not stew it in the byproducts of our excesses? Is it unimaginable that we could largely live the life the large lives we currently cling to, in a much less damaging fashion? |
Leopold valued simple pleasures and wrapped them in beautiful logic. Yet we are at a stage of our cultural evolution where we prefer blind and rigid ideology over logic and reason. Debate has become an antiquity, and lock ourselves into positions dictated by what we choose to believe rather than the evidence around us – “we’re causing global warming” versus “it’s perfectly natural”. If the sea level is rising and the ice caps melting at ever faster rates, does cause matter as much as consequences?
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I would relish the sound of Leopold’s voice in this glen this morning, by this stream burbling with the bacteriological curses resulting from market forces at work in a society thought to demand uniformity in its food while seemingly turning a blind eye to the massive doses of hormones, antibiotics and synthetic chemicals required to achieve that uniformity. A small, simple and exact dose of Midwestern reason would be a welcome acccompaniment to the hot coffee. No Earth Day of the future will be like Leopold’s time. But perhaps one future Earth Day we might actually be able to look across a more healthy and balanced landscape, producing local food for local people, rivers actually meeting and exceeding the swimmable and fishable requirements of the Clean Water Act passed in the wake of that first Earth Day, and perhaps even summer air healthy enough to breathe in major metropolitan areas. We can hope, and we can work, but most of all we can choose to make a little difference every day. Here at home, our beloved Shenandoah has been named one of the 10 Most Endangered American Rivers, ironically due to both rapidly increasing development throughout much of the watershed as well as agricultural runoff from industrial chicken feedlot operations in the Valley and in West Virginia. Two massive fishkills in recent years that wiped out one of the east's prime warm-water fisheries still have not been solved. And yet, we've made progress too - the antiquated Embry Dam near the tidewater of the nearby Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg was recently retired, and the successful return of the American shad (a migrating fish somewhat similar to salmon, and of profound historic significance as a valued food source) upriver has been a true delight for anglers and outdoor enthusiasts alike. |
Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. By land is meant all of the things on, over, or in the earth. Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism. Its parts, like our own parts, compete with each other and co-operate with each other. The competitions are as much a part of the inner workings as the co-operations. You can regulate them—cautiously—but not abolish them.
- Aldo Leopold
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Ever the Irish optimist, I refuse to concede the doom and defeat, for hope is ever near this morning. I see it in the children along the trail gleeful in the joy of discovery, the middle aged birdwatchers sharing notes on today's sightings, the neighbors gathered together to remove roadside detritus accumulated along the waysides of drive-through nation, and the retired couple volunteering and sweating profusely as they pull up the aggressive garlic mustard invading the floodplain and crowding out native wildflowers.
So on this Earth Day I resolve to do all I can to make a little difference every day and leave a little lighter footprint. American culture doesn't tend to change because of grand philosophical ideas, but rather practical advances. Things happen to make something a better choice. I'm no different. I use my compact fluorescent bulbs because I really like the light better! (I can live with 5 years between bulb changes too). I ride my moped because I love to toodle around on the back roads here at home between home, the general store and town. And I grow a good organic vegetable garden because I love to dig in the dirt and I'll be rewarded for my work with fresh stuff in summer and wonderful winter reminders when the ground is frozen hard.
There are other practical questions I hope to find better answers to as well, like, given the intended use of toilet paper, why does it need to be bleached bright white? Hmmm..
Check back in over the next year and I'll keep you posted! I'll think of you and smile every now and then while I take the recycles down to the bins at the general store, collect our newspapers to help the Fire Department make a little money, turn the compost out in the bin, or yank a few garlic mustard plants out from under the pines in the side yard. Thanks a lot for reading, and good luck to all of us.
The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only those who know the most about it can appreciate how little we know about it.
If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
- Aldo Leopold
