Confession: I didn't like A Sand County Almanac
and I still have a land ethic
Tl;dr
I haven’t done a tl;dr section for a few months because I haven’t felt like I needed it. But this post comes from deep inside my brain. For those short on time and who don’t want to experience my internal monologue, here you go:
A Sand County Almanac is a seminal work in the environmental movement authored by Aldo Leopold who is often considered the father of modern wildlife ecology, the conservation movement, and definer of what it means to live ethically in relationship to nature.
I have the impression that every legitimate environmentalist should have both read A Sand County Almanac and loved it. I didn’t like it.
This makes me feel like an imposter and a hypocrite deepening my near-constant overwhelm about how to live ethically on this planet. And increasing the chances of indifference.
Meanwhile, I know I love more-than-human nature. I have a land ethic. And I know taking care of our planet is an all-hands situation without space for indifference.
And, I know we need ALL educators EVERYWHERE to feel included and welcomed and part of the nature-connected learning movement.
Forced Reading
It took me years to read Aldo Leopold’s seminal treatise on ecology, A Sand County Almanac. As a tweenager who loved nature and books and writing, someone gave it to me and told me I should read it. I started reading it a bunch of times. With each beginning, after just a few pages, I found myself in a forced reading exercise that felt like homework without the carrot incentive of discussing the book with my classmates. So the book sat on my shelf, on my bedside table, on my shelf again, on my bedside table again. I would periodically open it and make it part way through a season of the almanac before putting it down again, not to return for months.
Finally, when I was 16, I went on a five-week canoe trip in northern Saskatchewan as part of my summer camp, Manito-wish. I had to choose just one book to bring with me. Against my better judgment and years of experience, I brought the Almanac (with essays on conservation from Round River).
Each day, the other four young women and I – all of us 16 except for our leader who must have been just 21 or 22 at the time – would paddle. It was simple. Our sole daily responsibility was to travel to our next site while paying attention to Maslow’s basics in relation to our small community of 5, Mother Nature, and the map.
As we paddled, we sang Both Hands, The Wood Song, The Water is Wide, blasting the Indigo Girls and Ani Difranco from our lung-speakers as we plied the white-capped waters of wide-open lakes. We lined up rapids and rode downstream on currents. We scouted rapids and made decisions to portage or run them. The Pink River, Geike River, Churchill River, Brabant Lake, Wollaston Lake, Reindeer Lake. I don’t remember all of the names of the places we traveled but I can picture them together in a boreal-forest-subarctic mix-tape of memories.
Our afternoons and evenings in camp were also Maslowian. We’d gather firewood and set up our shelters, build a fire, cook over the fire, and eat a well-earned dinner. The essentials completed – or sometimes simultaneous to their implementation – we’d travel up the pyramid to talk, play games, and read out loud from books including the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Sigurd Olsen’s The Lonely Land to discover more about ourselves on our adolescent path to self-actualization and to consider our relationship to the land – and waters – through which we traveled.
We’d retire well before the subarctic sun, an orb that lingered in the sky for north of 16 hours, to a restful evening, our bodies tired from good old physical exertion and a day spent on water under sky.
Out there, I had hours of idle time in a tent in the evening and no shelf. I finally read A Sand County Almanac.
As I slogged through the Almanac, reading in a way that resembled portaging a canoe through a boggy, plant-choked marsh, I told my trip mates about Leopold’s “beautiful writing.” I squinted when I read, willing myself to fall in love with this book by the father of modern ecology, trying to absorb a drop of wisdom from within his picturesque monthly-seasonal, word-painting observations of more-than-human nature and place. At some point, I might have even kind-of convinced myself that I liked the Almanac. I felt proud for having selected this of all books as my choice for the canoe trip.
Even before I finished, I added a feather to my bonafide environmentalist cap.
But the truth is – even as I spent my days moving through the subarctic boreal forest and waterways by canoe, observing lenticular clouds and knowing they meant we were in for a windy paddle, seeing cirrus whisps and noting the change in pressure, watching apparently delicate arctic terns and marveling at their improbable longest-of-all birds’ migration from pole to pole each year, getting glimpses of beavers at work and being sure not to fill my water bottle downstream of their dams, catching, fileting and eating Northern Pike (eating fish only after we had released the first caught in the watershed and only after we thanked each one for contributing to our nourishment), being with land and water as closely as I am able – and even as I wrote in my own journal each evening and developed my very own land ethic – I had a hard time connecting with Leopold’s meditative observations from Wisconsin.
Unrelatable
It feels like blasphemy to admit it: I didn’t actually like the Almanac. Yes, there were some beautiful turns of phrase which I underlined and highlighted with theatrical flair. I starred and chicken-scratched marginalia. I nodded and uh-huhed and “yes’d” as I read. But it wasn’t honest. At best it was a cold, earned affinity. But really, I just didn’t like it. Too slow. Too boring. Too unnrelatable.
The fact that the Almanac was unrelatable for me is ironic on several levels. First, I grew up in Wisconsin in the woods. Second, I love nature and spend as much time as possible outdoors. Third, I have participated in the act of journaling – nature journaling even – during hundreds of days while on expeditions in BIG days-and-nights-under-skies-Capital N-Nature. How could something as simple as journaling about a place in Leopold’s own backyard feel unrelatable to me? And why did (does) this fact make me feel so insecure?
Insecurity
I think it’s because I’m not a good sit-stiller. I’m not good at quiet. I struggle with the basic skills required to produce something like The Almanac. Which made (makes) me feel insecure in my own brand of nature connection. Like my form of connecting with nature was (is) not good enough. Like I was (am) a poser. Basically, the Almanac generated a fierce case of Imposter Syndrome in me.
To this day, my nature connection has mostly been nurtured by moving through space by canoe or foot or bike or skis. It was (and is) partially about adventure – seeking experiences and novelty. It was (and is) partially about communing with more-than-human nature. It was (and is) about my own health and healing.
More than anything, for me, spending time in nature was (and is) about connecting with other humans in a present-eye-contact-listening-and-sharing-analog-off-grid-we-have-all-the-time-in-the-world way that feels endangered these days.
Hiking (also called walking 😂) and canoeing are probably the closest I’ve gotten to the stillness from whence A Sand County Almanac germinated except that each night’s camp was in a new location. However slowly I moved, any sense of place derived from these trips was connected to the region through which I traveled rather than a singular point-of-view and its flora and fauna observed and logged through the passage of time.
Why does it matter?
Honestly, I’m figuring this out still. I tell this story because I wonder how many of us nature-lovers feel like imposters. Like we don’t hug enough trees (though I have recently developed the habit of touching and listening to my fallen neighborhood tree-sister). I wonder how many people feel like me, as though there’s this profound, meditative type of nature connection that we can’t understand and will never reach.
Beyond not being deeply enough connected to nature in this specific, Zen-like way that I imagine led to Leopold’s Almanac, I wonder how many of us privileged enough to be writing on Substack and reading A Sand County Almanac feel like imposters in the environmental movement. Or like hypocrites. Or overwhelmed. Or all of the above.
How many of us wrestle with why we haven’t eliminated air travel even when we know it’s the biggest lever we “high-emitting” individuals can pull to reduce our carbon footprint but, hey, we moved to a new continent 2 years ago and even as we build community here, we miss loved ones in our other homes? How many of us are hung up knowing we have decided not to deal with the logistical challenges needed to carpool or use the bus, choosing individual vehicles and convenience over our planet? How many of us wonder why we haven’t yet prioritized solar panels on our roofs or adopted a vegan diet? How many of us feel gripped by all forms of consumerism and tied in knots of overwhelm by our awareness that electric vehicles – and the very laptop on which I type this newsletter – are driving a modern form of slavery in cobalt mines in the Congo?
I find myself staring at a shitty choice set trying to figure out if it’s “better” to continue emitting more carbon into the atmosphere or to subsidize a mining industry that is actively abusing and oppressing real human beings right now. And oh-by-the-way what’s for dinner and who’s on bedtime — wait I have a late-night meeting — and did we figure out that health insurance claim and did we make dentist appointments for the kids and I need to book my ultrasound to check out those cysts, and and and. Life.
I am sure Aldo Leopold would never have wanted his journals about nature to play a role in this vicious doom loop. Especially not for an ally with a land ethic who loves him even if she doesn’t like his Almanac.
So I think this is what we might call a “me problem.” And I’m writing today to work through it for myself. And if Imposter Syndrome, hypocrisy, overwhelm and the potential indifference to which they can lead are “you problems” too, maybe this can help. Because I intend to keep living on this messy beautiful blue planet (and hope you do too!) and I know I love more-than-human nature (and know you do too). And I love humans (and hope you do too).
The Terrible Sin of Indifference
On my Wednesday-morning forest jog, I was listening to
’s podcast The Wise Unknown in which she interviews wise people that are behind the scenes in the lives of famous people who are in the limelight. In this episode, she interviewed Lori Barra, a wise person in author and feminist Isabel Allende’s life.Before handing over the mic and stage, Isabel introduced Lori – her daughter-in-law and the executive director of her philanthropic foundation, and her wise-yet-unknown-by-most person. Isabel spoke of the profound problems in the world that her foundation seeks to address and how sometimes when she thinks about the scale and gravity of it all, she can go to dark places, thinking,
This is a drop of water in a desert of need and suffering. What does it mean? It doesn’t mean anything.
Fortunately, when Isabel starts to go to those dark places, Lori, her wise person, reminds her that it’s not about numbers.
This is not an abstract endeavor. This is one life at a time, one story at a time, one person at a time…
Isabel continues with this jewel of wisdom from Lori:
She has protected me from the terrible sin of indifference because we tend to protect ourselves from the world by saying there’s nothing we can do. She reminds me that yes, there’s always something we can do.
This message felt like a timely antidote to imposter syndrome and a way to dampen my feelings of hypocrisy and overwhelm. It also felt like an on-brand Becca/
message.The Water is Wide
In the education realm, I wonder how many of us educators don’t do nature-based learning – teaching students outdoors or bringing elements of nature indoors for learning – because we aren’t meditative/Zen/naturey enough. How many of us don’t teach students outdoors because we perceive that we’re not outdoorsy enough for it? Or because we feel like we lack the skills to do so, even when the expertise it takes to promote any semblance of learning in a crowded, windowless, fluorescent light-filled box are far more advanced than anything required to teach students outdoors? Or because we haven’t had the opportunity to learn – and feel – how good nature connections are for our learners and for us? And for our relationship to more-than-human beings? Or because massive inequities in the distribution of green space mean we don’t have much nature near our schools?
I wonder how many of us have convinced ourselves that we don’t know enough about the environment or about climate change to “do” environmental education. How many of us feel like hypocrites teaching about environmental problems because we don’t do enough outside of work to protect our planet? I wonder how many of us feel we don’t have any agency ourselves — so how can we possibly instill this in our students?
Or how many of us have imbibed the narrative that nature connection is partisan or political and have consequently steered our lessons in circuitous routes avoiding the very soup in which we are swimming and in-so-doing falling off a cliff toward abject irrelevance.
I wonder how many of us are just overwhelmed by all of the immediate problems facing our schools, our students, and ourselves right now.
And it’s true, the water is wide.
Which I guess is why it all comes back to connecting our own students with nature within our locus of control.
“The water is wide, I can't cross o'er
And neither do I have wings to fly
Give me a boat that can carry two
And both shall row
My love and I
And both shall row
My love and I”
Let our boat carry way more than two.
Let’s load everyone we can fit into our nature-connected learning canoe. In fact, let’s assemble a fleet of canoes — birch bark and wood or aluminum or fiberglass or plastic — capable of accommodating 81 million teachers in schools across the globe so we may all paddle together through white caps and placid waters, buoyed by knowing this is not abstract — we are making a difference.
❤️B
Great book recommendation! I have the same problem with Awareness by Antony DeMello
Or right now.