Legacy Matters

Seeds to Trees to Center

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.

From Aldo Leopold's Sand Country Almanac, 1948

When I was in Washington working with the Fish and Wildlife Service, Aldo Leopold was considered  the founding father of wildlife ecology, his ground-breaking book, Game Management, the bible because it defined the fundamental skills and techniques of managing and restoring wildlife populations.

One lawyer always quoted Leopold to support the Endangered Species Act.

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part  is good, whether we understand it or not. 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.

Leopold's basic concept of the land as a living organism and his land ethic was to include "soils, waters, plants, and animals" or the land as an essential part of every community.

For him, "land is not merely soil: it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals."

His philosophy of living in community with the land and with each other was further developed in Sand Country Almanac which he wrote in a chicken coop on a worn out farm near Baraboo, Wisconsin in an area known as the sand counties.

Sand Country Almanac was published in 1949, a year after Leopold was killed fighting a grass fire.

Now pine trees he planted nearly 70 years ago will be used to construct a new Aldo Leopold Legacy Center on that once worn out piece of land he bought in Barbaroo, announced the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

Nina Leopold Bradley, who helped her father plant the pines after a drought killed all the trees they had planted in 1935, says that use of the trees for the structure is "a natural"

"It seems just right that we would use our own wood for the facility," said Bradley, 88, who lives on the eastern edge of the Leopold reserve.  My husband and I built (our) house from trees we planted, too. It's all really quite nice."

A Great Legacy come full circle.