Leopold's Colors: Evanescent and Durable

When Aldo Leopold had his druthers, June found him fly fishing. On the Alder Fork of the Wisconsin River, he might don chest waders and wait for hours in a trout-cold stream, or climb the bank, bushwack “neck deep in jewelweed and nettles,” then re-immerse in a deeper, quieter pool, all for a chance to set hard on a great fish.

Yet as anyone who has read A Sand County Almanac knows, Leopold wasn’t just fishing for trout. An avid hunter, birdwatcher, hiker, and angler since childhood, he believed in outdoor experience as a universal human need, a vital means not just of knowing the natural world but of appreciating it. No essay expresses this better than “The Green Pasture.”

Leopold begins:

Some paintings become famous because, being durable, they are viewed by successive generations, in each of which are likely to be found a few appreciative eyes.
I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all, except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush, and it is the same river who, before I can bring my friends to view his work, erases it forever from human view.


Because Leopold knew the Wisconsin so well, he noticed when the river dipped its brush in silt and painted it on a sandbar. He watched colors begin to appear—goldfinches bathing in blue pools, “great white fleets” of clouds overhead, and, especially, the verdant rush, Eleocharis. Just three weeks later, Leopold writes,

The artist has now laid his colors, and sprayed them with dew. The Eleocharis sod, greener than ever, is now spangled with the blue mimulus, pink dragon-head, and the milk-white blooms of Sagitarria. Here and there a cardinal flower thrusts a red spear skyward. . . .And if you have come quietly and humbly, as you should to any spot that can be beautiful only once, you may surprise a fox-red deer, standing knee-high in the garden of his delight.

Vacillations in the river’s course and level soon erase the painting except from Leopold’s memory. And while he hopes to witness it again, the scene’s ephemeral nature is part of its value to him. Any tourist, he observed, could spot the timeless grandeur of a scenic overlook—yet few step out of the car longer than it takes to snap a few photos. Joni Kinsey in a critical essay on Leopold’s “Land Esthetics,” says, “He even suggests that humble sites are more rewarding than the conventionally beautiful, if only because they require more effort to see fully.”

In June, and in every month, Leopold urged us to venture outside again and again, to seek out the colors, shapes, and textures in nearby nature that bind us to our own land and help develop our aesthetic perception of nature. He didn’t expect everyone to shiver in a trout stream or thrash through nettles, but rather to find a nearby green pasture, where beauty builds with time and repeated visits, beyond the pretty “to values as yet uncaptured by language.” Often, a half-wild patch in your own back forty, unreachable by car, can do more to enhance perception than a motor trek to a distant wilderness. Leopold closes his Almanac with the words, “Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.”

Many thanks to Ophis for the lovely shot of Canada geese breakfasting on their own green pasture of Eleocharis.

Joni Kinsey's essay, "Land Esthetics" can be found in The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quotations and Commentaries, Curt Meine and Richard Knight, eds. University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.

Hope in The Post

My Sundays usually begin with a perusal of The Washington Post. My husband grabs the front page (& comics), so I head straight for the book review section. Yesterday, there weren’t any nature or science books that caught my eye (though I'm going to check out one on mistakes women make trying to balance career and motherhood--The Feminine Mistake). But when my husband relinquished Page 1, my reading ups and downs began.

First came a down. As a minor participant but fervent supporter in the StepItUp global warming protests Saturday, I anticipated a front page story on the 1,400 rallies nationwide. Nope. Paging deeper into the Post, I finally came upon a below the fold, left hand corner item on A6, Nationwide, a Clamor Over Global Warming. Compare those few inches of coverage to literally pages on the primary fundraising duel between Obama and Clinton, and you can see my distress. If an international outcry against the greatest environmental threat ever faced can’t get the headlines, what can?

Distraught over the StepItUp reporting, I was in the perfect mood to see an “Outlook” section editorial by a fine writer I know, Janna Bialek. She charges in
Why I Won’t Be Celebrating Earth Day This Year that environmentalists have become just another special interest group. By arranging carpools and recycling drives, she argues, environmentalists let others off the hook to drive SUVs and overheat their McMansions. Bialek’s sitting out Earth Day, she says, and now rejects being called an environmentalist because “Time has proved that the message of Earth Day—that awareness will lead to action—is naïve.” Some readers might view such words as an admission of defeat, but Bialek, I think, means them to jolt us into action. On Earth Day, she’ll skip the organized tree plantings to search alone for wildflowers or eagles, but mostly for spiritual renewal. She needs, as we all do, hope that we can find a way to save the earth. That, I think, is how I’ll make Earth Day every day this year, searching for hope in newspapers, films, books, and of course outdoors.

I’d be remiss not to mention another source of hope in Sunday’s Post. Chad Pregracke is in Washington, D.C., running cleanups of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers. The projects are part of his riverkeeping campaign that began a decade ago on the Mississippi. The Post calls him “the Al Gore of the nation’s river system,” and Robert Kennedy, Jr. hails him as “a genuine American hero.” What’s not to be hopeful about that? DC area readers might like to read the Post article, Trawling for Trash to Keep our Rivers Clean, especially if you have time to pitch in. But if you’d like to learn about hands-on, stepped-up environmental action, visit the website for Pregracke’s 2007 book, From the Bottom Up: One Man’s Crusade to Clean America’s Rivers . I haven’t read it yet, so I’d love to hear what people think of it.