Nothing so important as an ethic is ever “written”...
it evolves in the minds of a thinking community.
—Aldo Leopold
INSIDE THE SHACK, as this place is known, I had the eerie feeling that someone had just left. Part of me expected to see a meal, still warm and waiting, on the bare wood table. In a few months, the Shack would be declared—finally—a National Historic Landmark. But for now, it remained unprotected, hiding in plain sight in trees along a country road. The Shack’s single room is small, as befits the rebuilt chicken coop that it is.
A slab of native rock above the stone fireplace is soot-stained; two oil lanterns sit on the oak mantel. The fireplace contains a mound of ashes and half-burned logs. Corner shelves hold cooking pots and a blue metal coffee pot. On the floor next to the fireplace: iron cooking pots. On the whitewashed walls: frying pans, strainers, an egg beater, baskets, shovels, racks, a post-hole hand drill, a two-man lumberjack saw.
Two turtle shells decorate another shelf, along with the feathers of a hawk, a pencil in a drinking glass, and a disheveled row of old books, some slid down on their sides. The table is surrounded on three sides by rough, hand-hewn benches.
This is the shack and surrounding woods that Aldo Leopold wrote about in his classic, A Sand County Almanac, which ranks among the handful of seminal books that formed the modern environmental movement. In the book, Leopold articulated his now famous Land Ethic. “The land consists of soil, water, plants, and animals, but health is more than a sufficiency of these components,” he wrote. “It is a state of vigorous self-renewal in each of them, and in all of them collectively.” He argued that humans should treat nature as they would another human being, that “society is like a hypochondriac—so obsessed with its own economic health that it has lost the capacity to remain healthy.” All human ethics, he argued, evolved “upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.” The land ethic “simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively, the land.” In other words, our relationship with nature is more than preserving land and water; it is also our participation with, our role as members of, this wider community.
Leopold lived this ethic. In 1912 he served as U.S. Forest Service supervisor of the million-acre Carson National Forest in New Mexico, and in 1924 became associate director of the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, at the time the principal research institution of the Forest Service. In 1933, he was appointed chair of Game Management at the University of Wisconsin. During this period, he bought this plot of land near Baraboo, Wisconsin, and converted the chicken coop.
The ground had been farmed to death, but Leopold and his wife and children planted a pine forest and a prairie, attempting to restore the acreage to its pre-European-settlement condition. Their forest grew.
An hour had passed since I had entered the Shack. The light was fading. I sat on a handmade bunk bed. A dozen eight-by-ten-inch photographs, stained and dust-covered, were stacked and scattered on a bench. I held an image of Leopold standing outside the Shack. In the photograph, he tended burning logs. His wife looked into the smoke. I leafed through more of the photographs, restacking them as I went. Some of family, others of the Shack, but most were of the land itself.
Lingering, I studied my favorite photograph: Leopold’s daughter Estella, perhaps nine years old, crouched at water’s edge, wearing an oversized felt slouch hat, brim turned up on one side. She is launching a toy boat. Around her the sand is scalloped in little dunes. She is looking at the camera with a slight smile. I put the photo back on the bench and walked out of the Shack and down a path through the woods to the banks of the Wisconsin River, where Estella and her sisters and brothers played long ago. I thought about how enriched their lives were, on this land, among these trees.
A black Labrador moseyed down from the woods and fell in step. At the bank, the dog plunged ecstatically into the river, and paddled into clear water.
A Sand County Almanac was published several months after Leopold’s death in 1948, when he was sixty-one. He died of a heart attack shortly after fighting a fire on a neighbor’s land not far from the Shack. The new, energy-efficient Leopold Center, made from trees culled from that forest, now sits on that land, up the road, past the wetlands where sandhill cranes step delicately. The Center’s inaugural conference brought me here in April 2007. I was privileged to be one of a dozen people invited to consider how the Land Ethic could be applied anew in the twenty-first century. Leopold’s daughters, Nina and Estella, and surviving son, Carl, now in their seventies and eighties, were our hosts. Our group made slight progress that day. We agreed that a new ethic—built on the ideas of Leopold and others, and shaped by a host of new practices and realities—is gathering.
In the early days of American conservationism, the influence of the natural world on the human organism was discussed as much as the human impact on nature, perhaps more. Douglas Brinkley, a recent Theodore Roosevelt biographer, writes, “Underlying President Roosevelt’s love of pelicans and other birds was a staunch belief in the healing powers of nature. That he had a mighty strong Thoreauvian ‘back to nature’ aesthetic strain coursing through his veins becomes evident when we read his correspondence . . . with leading naturalists of his day.” And, Brinkley writes, Roosevelt argued in his later years “that parents had a moral obligation to make sure their children didn’t suffer from nature deficiency.”1 Roosevelt’s emphasis on direct, personal experience in nature overlapped the nature study movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pioneered by, among others, Anna Botsford Comstock, who, with her husband John Henry Comstock, headed the Department of Nature Study at Cornell University and wrote the popular Handbook of Nature Study. The movement steered the education of children toward the use of nature experiences, not only for scientific learning, but for a deeper appreciation of the human experience. The nature study movement also changed the lives of countless adults, but critics began to dismiss that movement as soft and sentimental. Its power faded.2
By the late twentieth century, the emphasis of environmentalism had shifted strongly toward protection of the environment and preservation—to the point where the words conservation and environmentalism began to take on nuanced meanings in the public consciousness. Even now, many people consider conservationists more conservative: conservationists hunt and fish and think in terms of natural resources. Environmentalists—in the minds of some people, particularly their opponents—wish to protect nature from people; environmentalists are more likely to see nature in broad strokes, such as the impact of climate change.
These stereotypes are not entirely true or fair, but they do exist, to the extent that journalists tread this linguistic territory with care and confusion. There are no hard-and-fast rules on how to use these terms. Some people, of more conservative bent, will insist, “I’m no environmentalist—one of those tree-huggers. I’m a conservationist.” And they’ll know exactly what they mean by that. Some self-identified environmentalists are wary of “conservationists,” whom they associate with hunting and tree cutting. (Those belonging to a third group, Conservationists Formerly Known as Environmentalists, haven’t changed their basic outlook, but have come to the conclusion that the word environmentalist carries too much political baggage.)
These divisions were foreshadowed by a disagreement between Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, and Leopold. Carson faulted Leopold because, as she interpreted his work, he had emerged from a tradition of using nature as a resource to be managed and harvested—he hunted and he logged. His youngest daughter, Estella, now emeritus professor of botany at the University of Washington, tells me that, in retrospect, this disagreement was overplayed, and that these two views of our relationship with nature—preservation and participation—are in the process of renewal. Today, such semantics are beginning to fade. Inevitably, the context is shifting from humans and nature, to humans in nature, and humans as nature.
Before he cofounded the Center for Whole Communities, Peter Forbes worked for eighteen years to lead conservation projects for the Trust for Public Land. He helped to protect threatened portions of Thoreau’s Walden Woods, launched a program to protect and revitalize urban gardens and farms across New England, and worked to add twenty thousand acres of wild lands to New Hampshire’s White Mountain National Forest, among other major efforts. He is a leading proponent of a brand of what he calls community-based conservation, which holds equal the health of the people and the health of the land. He argues that we’re moving into an era in which the protection of nature, more than ever, must be placed in the larger sphere of relationships. “For example, a bit more than one-third of all the privately owned land in America is posted No Trespassing but 78 percent of all publicly owned land in America is posted No Trespassing,” he says. “I know there are many good reasons to keep people off conserved land, but . . . that is not, nor ever can be, the basis for a broad social movement.” Millions of acres of natural habitat have been protected in recent years; this is good but not sufficient. Even with such protection, are Americans “closer to that land or to the values that the land teaches?”
A healthy, whole community, he argues, begins with people in relationship to one another and to the land, and with this underlying assumption: “Relationship to place is as important as the place itself.” As part of a new land movement, we “must focus on the human heart as much as the land itself. And what the human heart needs and craves today, and has through the ages, is relationship and connection to the larger, more meaningful diversity of life.”
Such thinking is gaining strength in mainstream environmental and conservation groups. Carl Pope, chairman of the Sierra Club, tells this parable: “Once there was a man who tended and nurtured a beautiful garden all of his life. When the time came for him to leave this earth, he gathered his children and said to them, ‘I have loved my garden. Now it is yours to care for.’ To this, his children said, ‘Why should we care for your garden? You never let us in it!’”
Sustainability is a primary goal, no doubt about it, but to some the word suggests stasis. As more than one person has asked, who wants a sustainable marriage? Sustainability is necessary, but it’s not enough. Our language has not kept pace with the changing realities of the human relationship with nature. In fact, even the most basic descriptive words are endangered, in part because daily associations with nature have faded. In 2008, the new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary deleted the names of over ninety common plants and animals, among them nouns such as acorn, beaver, canary, clover, dandelion, ivy, sycamore, vine, violet, willow, and blackberry. What words were added? MP3 players, voicemail, blogs, chat rooms, and BlackBerry, a smartphone. Rather than letting the language of nature slip away or grow stale, we must add to it; we need new or refreshed ways to describe a hybrid world in which technology and nature are balanced, in which we experience the deeper powers of nature in our everyday lives.
A good friend of mine retrofitted his house with a state-of-the-art solar-cell system. His reveries about this accomplishment are impressive on one level. By going solar, he now spends about five dollars a year on his electricity bill (not counting the sixty-five dollars a month energy fee required by the state of California, even if he doesn’t use that much energy—it’s complicated); and he will soon start selling electricity to the state. As admirable as this is, my friend can veer into a mind-numbing recitation of technical terms and calculations. When talking about the more generalized “environment,” he favors technical jargon. Only when pressed does he describe what this does for his own energy—his health, soul, and psyche.
“Well . . .” he said. “I do feel a . . .” He struggled for words. “Independence, I guess . . . but remember, I’m not off the grid. I don’t want to be. I want to feed energy into the grid.” He fell silent for a moment. Then he began to talk about relationship. He described his sense of becoming a “good ancestor, plugged into deep time.”
This truly conservative idea, of honoring the role of ancestor, may itself seem out of time, but that is only because today’s culture is frozen in time, obsessed with the immediate, and fearful of the future. My friend’s words are given added meaning by his actions beyond his solar-powered house. He has spent years helping create an ocean-to-mountains regional conservancy, a vast nature park that his descendents may well enjoy seven generations from now. When he talks about his solar panels, in the context of generations past and future, his voice softens, he speaks with deeper passion, and he becomes more convincing. He is a good ancestor.
Through the use of tense and other linguistic idiosyncrasies, American Indian storytellers often describe their people’s historic events as if they were, or are, there— in deep time. Similarly, they sometimes speak of the future as if it has already happened, and they have helped shape it. Recently, I encountered something similar in Australia. It’s a relatively new custom there, one that we in the United States should emulate. At the opening of most major conferences, indigenous people are asked to give an invocation, and the first person to speak offers a brief statement honoring the original inhabitants of that particular site and the land itself.
What struck me about this ritual was that, by showing respect for the ancestors and for generations to come, the tone subtly shifted. Respect is contagious. This simple act, while not banishing racism, places it in a larger relationship. It offers a moment of reconciliation not only between humans, but between humans and land, and between generations.
In recent years, the environmental movement has become highly self-critical, which can be seen as a sign of movement strength. It’s too easy to forget that just three decades ago few people talked about recycling; that in the 1950s and ‘60s, intelligent people thought nothing of throwing empty beer cans or hamburger wrappers out the car window, and how common it was to see rusted hulks of automobiles dumped into riverbeds or roadside ravines. Such scenes are rare today. Rivers that once caught fire are now fishable. The bald eagle is back. But these successes, and more, did not prepare us for even larger global challenges, including the human distancing from the natural world.
Now a river gathers force, growing from many tributaries: American Indian thought and tradition; Thoreau and Emerson; Theodore Roosevelt’s faith in the restorative powers of nature; the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, whose designs gave America its great urban parks; the healthy cities movement at the turn of the nineteenth century; parts of many of our religious texts; and, of course, the writings of Leopold, Rachel Carson, and others.
Science is nourishing the headwaters; an expanding body of evidence links the human experience in the natural world to better physical health and enhanced cognitive abilities. New branches reach outward. Among them, as we have seen, are biophilic design, reconciliation ecology, green exercise, ecopsychology and other forms of nature therapy; place-based learning, the “whole communities” movement, Slow Food and organic gardening; the walkable cities movement; and the movement to reconnect children with the outdoors.
On the banks of this river, conversation is becoming more interesting, moving beyond protection and participation, and even beyond sustainability, to creation—not the biblical kind, but creation nonetheless.
On this topic, Leopold was prescient. He thought long and hard about creation. “To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a good shovel,” he wrote. “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.”3 As suggested earlier in this book, environmentalism’s motto should become to conserve and create. In addition to conserving resources and preserving wilderness, we must create new, regenerative environments. By the old way of thinking, a botanical garden should be in every city. By the new way of thinking, every city should be in a botanical garden.
Recognizing the mind/body/nature connection will be one of the most important actions that a revitalized environmental movement can take.
Leopold foresaw much of this, but so have others. In 1996, Thomas Berry (writing in more metaphysical terms) described what he called the Ecozoic era: “In the sequence of biological periods of Earth development we are presently in the terminal phase of the Cenozoic and the emerging phase of the Ecozoic era. The Cenozoic is the period of biological development that has taken place during these past 65 million years. The Ecozoic is the period when human conduct will be guided by the ideal of an integral earth community, a period when humans will be present upon the Earth in a mutually enhancing manner.” He went on: “The Cenozoic period is being terminated by a massive extinction of living forms that is taking place on a scale equaled only by the extinctions that took place at the end of the Paleozoic around 220 million years ago and at the end of the Mesozoic some 65 million years ago. The only viable choice before us is to enter into an Ecozoic period.”
There is still much we need to learn about the natural world, including more detailed knowledge about the benefits to health, cognition, and community; how much nature contact and what kind is optimal; and how best to re-nature our communities. But, as Howard Frumkin, dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Washington, often says, we may need more research, “but we know enough to act.”
We can, in fact, build a new nature movement, a people-and-nature movement. The people who have spoken in the pages of this book suggest that such a movement has already begun. As it grows, health care professionals will prescribe green exercise and other nature experiences. Developers and urban planners will create homes, neighborhoods, suburbs, and cities that are nature-inclusive—and they will pursue nature-based urban and suburban renewal. This movement will dramatically increase the amount of nearby nature, resulting in greater biodiversity and increased food production closer to where we live. The movement will promote the creation of “de-central parks” and restorative transportation. New government policies will encourage greater human/nature social capital and build regional and personal identity. In education, this movement will push school districts and legislatures to incorporate nature’s ability to enhance learning and creativity, and redefine the classroom in grade schools as well as universities. Both business and education will support the creation and promotion of career paths that extend beyond sustainability to include careers that connect people to nature.
All of these changes, and more, can be accelerated by government policymakers. Business, conservation groups, foundations, civic groups, and places of worship can work to develop those polices. But at the personal level, we can move more quickly to restore our lives through nature. And there is another way to move ahead, an old tradition in new clothes.
Remember those cardboard kaleidoscopes we had when we were kids—how, when you twisted the cylinders, the pieces of colored plastic would snap into a vivid pattern? Sometimes the future comes into focus, just like that. For me, one such moment occurred at a conference held in New Hampshire in 2007. On that day, over a thousand people from across the state traveled to chart the course of the statewide effort to connect families with nature.
As hours of productive meetings came to an end, a father stood up, complimented the attendees’ creativity, and then cut to the chase. “We’ve been talking a lot about programs today,” he said. “Yes, we need to support the programs that connect people to nature, and yes, we need more programs. But the truth is,” he added, “we’ve always had programs to get people outside and kids still aren’t going outside in their own neighborhoods.” Neither, for that matter, are that many adults. He described his own experience. “A creek runs through my neighborhood, and I would love it if my girls could go down and play along that creek,” he said. “But here’s the deal. My neighbors’ yards back up to the creek, and I have yet to go to my neighbors and ask them to give permission to my kids to play along the creek. So here’s my question. What will it take for me to go to my neighbors and ask them for that permission?”
The New Hampshire dad was raising a fundamental question for people of all ages.
What will it take?
The goal is deep, self-replicating cultural change, a leap forward in what a society considers normal and expected. But how to get there from here? Let me offer my Three Ring Theory. The First Ring is comprised of traditionally funded, direct-service programs (nonprofits, community organizing groups, conservation organizations, schools, park services, nature centers, and so on) that do the heavy institutional lifting of connecting people to nature. The Second Ring is made up of individual docents and other volunteers, the traditional glue that holds together so much of society. These two Rings are vital, but each has limitations. A direct-service program can extend only as far as its funding will allow. Volunteers are constrained by the resources available for recruitment, training, management, and fund-raising. Many good programs are competing for the same dollars from the same funding sources, a process with its own price. Particularly during difficult economic times, the leaders of direct-service programs often come to view other groups doing similar work as competitors. Good ideas become proprietary; vision is reduced. This response is understandable.
The best programs and volunteer organizations transcend these limitations, but doing so is always a struggle.
Now for the Third Ring: a potentially vast orbit of networked associations, individuals, and families. This Ring is based on peer-to-peer contagion, people helping people creating change in their own lives and their own communities, without waiting for funding. This may sound like traditional volunteerism, but it’s more than that. In the Third Ring, individuals, families, associations, and communities use the sophisticated tools of social networking, both personal and technological, to connect to nature and one another.
Family nature clubs, described in an earlier chapter, offer one on-the-ground example. Using blog pages, social networking sites, and the old-fashioned instrument called the telephone (or smartphone), families are reaching out to other families to create virtual clubs that arrange multifamily hikes and other nature activities. An array of free organizing and activity tools is now available on the Internet for these clubs. They’re not waiting for funding or permission; they’re doing it themselves, doing it now.
Family nature clubs are only one example. The California-based organization Hooked on Nature, also described earlier, networks people who form “nature circles” to explore their own bioregions. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Exploring a Sense of Place organizes groups of adults who meet on weekends to go on hikes with botanists, biologists, geologists, and other experts on their regions’ natural world. Similarly, the Sierra Club has networked hikers for years.
New Third Ring networks could connect people who are rewilding their homes, yards, gardens, and neighborhoods; neighbors creating their own button parks; businesspeople and professionals, including developers, hoping to apply biophilic principles. These networks, unlimited in their ability to grow, could transform future policies of more traditional professional societies. For example, today’s influential Green Building Certification Institute’s LEED certification for buildings is almost exclusively focused on energy efficiency and low-environmental-impact design. It’s overdue for an update that would accommodate but go beyond energy conservation to include the benefits of more natural environments to human health and well-being. For the proponents of that change, going the conventional route to achieve such a policy change could take years. But an expanding network of individual professionals could accelerate that change—and as you read this, that may have happened already.
Similarly, networks of health care and wellness professionals already committed to the nature prescription could change elements of their professions without waiting for top-down pronouncements; peer-to-peer, they could change minds, hearts, and eventually official protocol, and they could, through this process, build a funding base for direct-service programs.
When I mentioned this Third Ring notion to the director of the Maricopa County Parks Department, the largest urban park district in the United States, he grew excited—not only about family nature clubs but about the broader context of the Third Ring. “I have programs right now in my park system for families, but they’re under-enrolled. This could be a way to change that,” he said. Moreover, he faces new budget challenges. By encouraging families to create self-sustaining, self-organizing nature networks, he would be expanding the number of people who use his parks. Just as important, the growth of a Third Ring could translate into future political support for parks funding. Similarly, as large land-trust organizations and governments help neighborhoods create their own nearby-nature trusts, overhead would be small, but their reach would grow. So would the public’s understanding of the importance of the land-trust concept. College students, those who hope to pursue careers connecting people to nature, could be similarly networked.
The Third Ring could be especially effective in changing the closed system of public education. At this writing, efforts are afoot to gather “natural teachers” into a national network. These educators, in primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities, are not necessarily environmental education teachers. They’re the teachers who intuitively or experientially understand the role that nature experience can play in education. They’re the art teachers, English teachers, science teachers, and many others who insist on taking their students outside to learn—to write poetry or paint or learn about science under the trees. I meet these teachers all over the country. Every school had one or two. And they feel alone.
What if thousands of these natural teachers were networked and, through this network, gained power and identity? Once connected, these educators could push for change within their own schools, colleges, and communities. Connected and honored, natural teachers could inspire other teachers; they could become a galvanizing—dare I say subversive?—force within their schools. In the process, they would contribute to their own psychological, physical, and spiritual health.
Third Ring networks can reach well beyond the immediate members. In Austin, Texas, a grade-school principal told me that he would love to include more nature experience in his school. “But you can’t imagine the pressure I’m under now with the testing,” he said. “We can’t do everything.” When I described the family nature club phenomenon, the principal was enthusiastic. Could he, I asked, provide tool kits—packed with educational material, guides to local parks, and so forth—and encouragement to children and parents to start their own nature clubs. “I could do that,” he said, and he meant it. He immediately began to think of how the educational elements of these clubs might augment his curriculum.
Earlier that day, in a meeting of leaders from central Texas, a PTA president spoke movingly. “Listen, I’m really tired of going into a roomful of parents and telling them not to give their kids candy, because of child obesity,” she said. “Recently I’ve started talking to them about getting their children, and themselves, outside in nature more often. You can’t believe the different feeling in the room. In the room where I’m preaching about candy, the mood is rather unpleasant, but when I’m in a room with parents and we’re talking about getting outside, then the mood is happy, even serene. Parents immediately relax when we talk about that.” During our meeting, she began to make plans for her PTA to start encouraging family nature clubs.
Social networking, online and in person, has transformed the political world. Online tools are used to raise funds, to organize face-to-face house parties, and turn out voters. A nature-focused Third Ring using those same tools, and ones not yet imagined, could create a growing constituency for needed policy changes and business practices. It could, in fact, help create a re-natured culture.
What if family nature clubs really caught on, like book clubs did in recent years? What if there were ten thousand family nature clubs in the United States, created by families for families in the next few years? What if the same process in other spheres of influence moved nature to the center of human experience? In such a culture, that father in New Hampshire would be more likely to knock on his neighbor’s door. Or, better yet, one of his neighbors will show up at his door, asking his family to join a new network of neighbors devoted to nature in their own neighborhood. Their first expedition: to explore the creek that runs through it.
To be clear, permanent cultural change will not take root without major institutional and legislative commitments to protect, restore, and create natural habitat on a global basis.