Tag Archives: Green Fire

Land Ethic

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How did a hard-boiled forester, hunter, professor, and fisherman become one of our most eloquent spokesmen for loving and caring for the land? Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) was a pioneer conservationist who is well known for his book of essays, A Sand County Almanac.  He credits a wolf in Arizona and a shack in Wisconsin for his personal transformation and the evolution of his ideas.

As a young forester in Arizona, Leopold killed a wolf.  In a section of his book called “Thinking Like a Mountain,” he remembered, “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.  I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes–something known only to her and to the mountain.  I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise.  But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”  Part of his transformation in the Southwest was that he ceased to merely act on his environment and began to act with it, listening to wolf and mountain, tree and stream.

“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.”  To enter the community Leopold made his own, at least on weekends when he could get away from his work at the University of Wisconsin, I drove to the Aldo Leopold Center near Baraboo, Wisconsin (www.aldoleopold.org).  At the Center, a gorgeous pine and stone building with two kinds of geothermal systems, I talked with an intern named Anna and she gave me directions to the secluded Shack and loaned me a bicycle to get there.  Following a paved road and then a grassy path, I arrived at the place that inspired so many of the essays in A Sand County Almanac.

When Aldo, his wife Estella, and their five children bought their property in 1935, it was a sandy, over-farmed field near the Wisconsin River, with only an old chicken coop left on it.  The family shoveled out the dirt and manure and made that coop livable for their many visits from Madison.  (One son built an outhouse they called the Parthenon.)  For Aldo, it was an experiment in renewing the land.  He and his family planted thousands of trees and wildflowers, making it a lush, green place.  A place to listen to the land.

“A land ethic,” Leopold wrote, “reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land.  Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal.  Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.”  He did that with his own hands, and died trying to extinguish a brush fire on his neighbor’s land.  His daughter, Nina, still lives near the Shack and has kept the green fire burning.

In 2012, look for the documentary on PBS, “Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and the Land Ethic in the 21st Century.”

I biked to the shack where Leopold wrote Sand County Almanac

Muir Musings in Marquette County

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At John Muir Park 2009

Barb at Ennis Lake, John Muir Park

Sun is breaking through the morning mist as I arrive at John Muir Park on October 27.  I walk down the hill to what the Muirs called Fountain Lake, now known as Ennis Lake, and see streams of holy light raking the fog-shrouded waters.

Though no structure remains, I know the Muirs’ farmhouse, built in 1850, was somewhere nearby.  I picture young John getting up on a day like today with the inside of the house about the same temperature as the outside: 34 degrees.  The one stove in the house was only for cooking, according to John’s father, Daniel.

The Scottish family made a farm here in central Wisconsin, their first home in America, when John was 11.  He and his brother attended school in Scotland, but in Wisconsin they were too busy doing farm chores and building a house.  Later, when the land wore out, the family moved to nearby Hickory Hills and John dug a well by hand through 90 feet of soil and stone.  He was almost worked to death, but the land and trees always revived him, as he wrote, remembering, “Young hearts, young leaves, flowers, animals, the winds and the streams and the sparkly lake, all wildly, gladly rejoicing together!”

As the mists lift, so do flocks of small birds, moving from shore grass to lofty treetops all gold and red with autumn leaves.  A marsh hawk flies by and I hear Sand Hill Cranes calling from the Fox River across Highway F.  I’ve come to commune with nature–and the spirit of John Muir.  As offerings, I have two of his favorite foods: bread and apple slices.

Moving away from the lake, I follow a mowed path.  A section of the Ice Age Trail goes around Ennis Lake, kept up by volunteers in order to highlight the history of the glaciers in Wisconsin.  I go over a hill and down to two spreading oak trees, still hanging onto their leaves.  As the sun brightens the sky, the tan leaves glow as if fresh-baked and buttered.  The trees are so big, surely they were around when young Johnnie Muir was here.  I offer chunks of spelt bread and Fuji apple.  I throw in an almond for good measure.

Driving home, north along Tenth Road, I finally see some Sand Hill Cranes.  There are dozens of them milling about in an open field bordered by corn.  Usually the cranes pair off in separate fields, but at this time of year they gather to prepare for their migrations to Texas or points further south.  They call to each other, a deep chortle like rusty hinges on a creaky door.

With almost no traffic I am free to linger along the side of the road, watching.  Three cranes glide by my car window, sailing along just to stretch their wings.  In the field, two elegant, gray cranes face each other and bow.  One flaps its wings, then the other.  Then there is bobbing all around followed by a minute’s rest.  Then more bobbing and flapping.  It is quite a dance.

I drive home to the cabin, munching the remains of the apple I shared with John Muir and the oak trees.  During his lifetime, Muir helped create national parks such as Yosemite, but he was unable to preserve this patch of land that had been so dear to him as a boy.  He tried, but it wasn’t until 1957 that it became John Muir Memorial Park, where anyone can visit and make their own connections with the natural beauty that helped form a passionate conservationist.