08/29/11Thinking Like a Mountain, A story by Jim Pfitzer
Thinking Like a Mountain
“There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other and the relation of people to the land.” -Aldo Leopold
For ages people have written of ethical dilemmas and responsibilities. Homer dealt with the responsibilities of Odysseus to his household and wife, and vice versa. Kant wrote of a moral imperative to respect each other. Aristotle saw the virtues as dispositions to act in ways that benefit the self and society. Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from the mountain. Then, in 1949, a new thought emerged in ethics.
Not long after his untimely death in 1948, Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac was published and in it, Leopold put forth the notion of a land ethic, that we have responsibilities not just to each other and to society, but to the entire biosphere–the air, the water, the plants and other animals, the land. He challenged ranchers to “think like a mountain,” and foresters to value resources in ways other than economic, and all of us to question our very understanding of the “balance of nature.”
As he wrapped up his Almanac, Leopold turned the attention of his land ethics to include with the ecologists and conservationists, the farmers. He wrote of a new vision of “biotic farming” in which “poundage or tonnage is no measure of the food-value of farm crops,” challenging us to measure the products of fertile soil qualitatively as well as quantitatively, that bolstering production through fertilizers was not bolstering value.
Leopold even took a look at organic farmers (and this was in the forties) saying that “while bearing some of the earmarks of a cult” organic farming is heading in a biotic direction in its insistence on the importance of soil flora and fauna, and calls on all farmers to stop looking at the land as an adversary, but to develop an ethical relation to land. This relationship with the land, he says, can only exist with love, respect, admiration, “and a high regard for its value…something far broader than mere economic value…value in the philosophical sense.
“We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many good points,” says Leopold in his closing words, “but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use.”
Perhaps this visionary conservationist would be proud of the efforts of farms like Crabtree. I suspect he would applaud the lofty goals of organizations like Gaining Ground. I am certain he would appreciate the community building work of our many farmers’ markets, CSA’s, and burgeoning co-ops. I am equally certain, however, that he would not allow any of us to rest here, but would challenge us to keep pushing forward, to make certain we do more than just develop and hold fast to an ethical relationship to the land, but that we pass on that ethic to our children, that we look at healthy soils and ecosystems not just as they relate to our crops, this season, but at how they can continue to evolve and sustain themselves beyond our vision.
Our time here is short, and vision, especially with objectivity, is difficult to find on such a short scale, but the land’s time is immeasurably long and its perspective hardly fathomable. In his essay Thinking Like a Mountain, Leopold posits that “only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.” This might be true, but with the right land ethic we can at least try to put ourselves in the mountain’s shoes if only for a while.
On Thursday, September 8th at 7 p.m. Gaining Ground will host a screening of Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and New Land Ethic For Our Time. The screening will be free of charge and for those interested, an informal discussion will follow at the Terminal Brewhouse.