Redesign and Aldo Leopold
Human
connectedness to nature has deep roots, as for five to seven million
years we walked this earth as hunters and gatherers, entirely dependent
on our knowledge of wild resources, and on our collective capacity to
gather plants and catch animals. About ten to twelve thousand years ago,
we began to domesticate plants and animals. For most of the time since
then, the culture of food production was intimately bound up in some
form of collective action, and in an intimate knowledge of nature. Where
city states emerged, as in Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, China, Maya and
mediaeval Europe, then the number of people no longer needing this
intimate connection for their livelihoods grew. But it was not until the
advent of the agricultural and industrial revolutions, just two hundred
years ago, that food production in some countries began its drift away
from the majority of the population. It is barely two generations since
agricultural became industrial, and modernist agriculture came to
dominate, and transferred food into only a commodity. This
industrialisation of a basic human connection has undermined many
things.
So for
three hundred and fifty thousand generations, we care and hunt, use and
overuse, harvest and replant, cut and re-seed, and from all this emerges
the human condition. Not a type of condition - but how we are. The state
of the world is an outcome of this relationship. For generations, our
effects were globally benign, though not necessarily locally. Today,
though, we are largely disconnected, and because of that we are less
likely to notice when the environment is further degraded, or when
valued resources are captured and damaged by others. We are satisfied to
know, or at least believe we are, that more and more food is being
produced. But if we lack the innate connections, we no longer question
when environmental and social problems emerge. We do not notice that the
extrinsic is damaged at the same time as the intrinsic withers away.
Though these breakdowns are symptoms of systemic disarray, there is
still hope.
There is
a great hero in landscape and community regeneration, and he is the
fictional creation of author, Jean Giono, resident of Manosque in France
for most of his life. In The Man Who Planted Trees,
Elzéard Bouffier, shepherd and silent roamer of the hills and valleys of
Provence, helps to transform a whole rural system. Giono stands
alongside all the greats of nature and wilderness writing, perhaps
surpassing many as his concerns are centred on the connection between
land and its people, and on what each can do for the other. According to
translator Norma Goodrich, Giono termed his confidence in the future
espérance, the word describing the condition of living in hopeful
tranquillity.
In the
fiction, the narrator comes upon Elzéard planting acorns amidst a
desertified landscape. There are no trees or rivers, houses are in ruin,
and a few solitary people eke out a meagre living. “In 1913, this
hamlet of ten or twelve houses had three inhabitants... hating one
another... all about the nettles were feeding upon the remains of
abandoned houses. Their condition had been beyond hope”. The unnamed
narrator returns five years later, then again in twelve years, and
finally thirty-two years after the original visit. Over all this time,
Elzéard continues to plant acorns, and seedlings of beech and birch, and
the landscape is steadily transformed. When the forest emerges, then the
wildlife returns, the rivers run freely, and the community is
regenerated. “Everything had changed. Even the air. Instead of the
harsh dry winds that used to attack me, a gentle breeze was blowing,
laden with scents. A sound like water came from the mountains: it was
the wind in the forest....Ruins had been cleared away, dilapidated walls
torn down... The new houses, freshly plastered, were surrounded by
gardens where vegetables and flowers grew in orderly confusion, cabbages
and roses, leeks and snapdragons, celery and anemones. It was now a
village where one would like to live”. This is the glorious key to
whole landscape redesign – the creation of places where we would really
like to live in espérance.
Most of
the main principles for redesign are present in this story. There is
leadership from a hero, someone willing to take a risk, to do something
different for the benefit of more than themselves. There is ecological
literacy, with knowledge about the particulars of local agroecology
helping to shape actions. There is the building of social and natural
assets as foundations for life and for sustainability. There is also a
sense of how long it takes, but just how good are the rewards. But the
shepherd is a loner, and achieves change only on a small scale. This new
agricultural sustainability revolution will not happen all at once. It
will take time, and require the coordinated efforts millions of
communities worldwide. But of one thing we should no longer be in any
doubt. This is the way forward, and it offers real hope for our world
and its interdependent people and biodiversity.
An Ethic
for Land, Nature and Food Systems
|
Aldo
Leopold’s masterpiece, Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and
There, was published in 1949, a year after his death. His
greatest contribution to us all was the idea of the land ethic. This
is a proposal for an ecological, ethical and aesthetic science to
shape human interactions with, and as a part of, nature. Leopold’s
land ethic sets out the idea that the beauty and integrity of nature
should be protected and preserved from our actions. |
 |
| |
| |
| |
Ethics is about limits to freedoms. We are free to destroy nature (and
we do), yet we should prescribe and accept certain limits. Leopold sees
humans as part of nature, not separated as distant observers or
meddlers. In the Sand County Almanac, he says ”We abuse land because
we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a
community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and
respect... That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but
that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.”
Such an ethic should be “a differentiation of social and anti-social
conduct”.
 |
 |
|
Aldo Leopold's
shack - then and now |
This
land ethic implies thinking of land and community as a connected network
of parts, which includes us as humans, and in which each element
possesses intrinsic rights. There are many different views of this land
ethic: some say it is visionary, others that it is dangerous nonsense.
But the point remains that most people in industrialised countries still
see nature as a bundle of resources separate from us. Thus the land
ethic remains radical, more than half a century after it was woven
together by Leopold.
In
truth, such an ethic is what makes us human - the recognition of and
respect for these limits. Freedoms are vital, but we have obligations
and responsibilities too. If we accept that we are an intricate part of
something, as we are of communities of the world, or that something is a
part of us, as are our livers or lungs, it should be absurd to engage in
some action that endangers a component, since the whole will suffer. The
Amazon is not a part of me, so I may destroy it. Yet if I do so, the
consequences for the atmosphere are severe, and in the end I will
suffer. Leopold understood the connection between economies and nature:
“I realise that every time I turn on an electric light, or ride on a
Pullman, or pocket the unearned investment on a stock or a bond, or a
piece of real estate, I am `selling out’ to the enemies of
conservation... When I pour cream in my coffee, I am helping to drain a
marsh to graze, and to exterminate the birds of
Brazil. When I go birding or hunting in my Ford, I am devastating
an oil field, and re-electing an imperialist to get me rubber”.
These
choices matter. They do in today’s food system. Each time we buy some
food, our choices make a difference to nature and communities somewhere
- though there is perhaps a danger of overstating the power of consumers
in the face of structural economic constraints. We are connected within
a much larger system, and we can make these connections work to the good
– if we wish. Albert Howard was one of the most influential of British
scientists to take an holistic view of the connections between nature
and people. He spent twenty-six years in India, and developed the Indore
Process in which modern scientific knowledge was applied to ancient
methods. He called for a restoration of agriculture based on an
improvement to the health of the whole system, saying that “the
birthright of all living things is health. This law is true for soil,
plant, animal and humans: the health of these four is one connected
chain. Any weakness or defect in the health of any earlier link in the
chain is carried on to the next and succeeding links, until it reaches
the last, namely us”.
What do
we need to do differently? Perhaps the most compelling of Aldo Leopold’s
essays is a short but brilliant piece called Thinking Like a Mountain,
in which he details the relationship between the wolf, deer and mountain
in Arizona. He first recalls his own shooting of a mother wolf caring
for a tumbling pack of cubs: “in those days, we never heard of
passing up a chance to kill a wolf”, and then mourns their loss and
his earlier lack of understanding. He goes on to describe the
consequences of eliminating the wolves, for, without them, the deer
expand too greatly in numbers, and the mountain loses all its
vegetation. In the end the whole system collapses. He says “Only the
mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the
wolf. Those unable to decipher the hidden meaning know nevertheless that
it is there, for it is felt in all wolf country, and distinguishes that
country from all other land”. These interconnections are true,
though, of all lands, and are again something that Leopold saw, echoing
Thoreau’s phrase of almost a century earlier: “In wildness is the
salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl
of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among
men”.
