Companion to A sand county almanac: interpretive & critical essays PDF
Preview Companion to A sand county almanac: interpretive & critical essays
Companion to A 8and County AlmantU: Companion to A Sand County Almanac Interpretive & Critical Essays * Edited by 1. Baird Callicott THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS The University of Wisconsin Press 2537 Daniels Street Madison, Wisconsin 53718 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU, England Copyright © 1987 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System The 1947 foreword to A Sand County Almanac copyright © 1987 by the Aldo Leopold Shack Foundation All rights reserved + Printed in the United States of America Frontispiece photograph counesy of Roben A. McCabe Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Companion to A sand county almanac. Includes bibliographies and index. I. Leopold, Aldo, 1886-19+8. Sand county almanac. I. Callicott, J. Baird. QH8J.L563C66 1987 508.73 87-10396 ISBN 0-299-11230-6 ISBN 0-299-1123+-9 (pbk.) Cover design: David Ford Cover photograph courtesy of Charles Bradley Contents Preface Vll Introduction 3 I. The Author 1. AIdo Leopold's Early Years 17 CURT MEINE 2. AIdo Leopold's Sand Country 40 SUSAN FIADER 3. AIdo Leopold's Intellectual Heritage 63 RODERICK NASH II. The Book 4· The Making ofA Sand County Almanac 91 DENNIS RIBBENS Anatomy of a Classic no 5· JOHN TALlMADGE 6. The Conflicts of Ecological Conscience 128 PETER A. FRITZELL v Contents III. The Upshot 7. The Land Aesthetic 157 J. BAIRD CALLICOTT 8. Building "The Land Ethic" 172 CURT MEINE 9. The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic 186 J. BAIRD CALLICOTT Iv. TheImpact 10. A Pilgrim's Progress from Group A to Group B 221 EDWIN P. PISTER II. The Legacy of AIdo Leopold 233 WALLACE STEGNER 12. Duties to Ecosystems 246 HOLMES ROLSTON, III Appendix An Introduction to the 194-7 Foreword [to Great Possessions] 277 DENNIS RIBBENS Foreword 281 ALDO LEOPOLD Contributors 291 Index 295 Vl Preface AIdo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac has brought a genera tion to a groundswell change in environmental consciousness and conscience. For all its charm and apparent simplicity, A Sand County Almanac is as incisive and complex as it is trans formative. This volume brings together twelve interpretive and critical essays by ten scholars, representing various academic dis ciplines. For us, A Sand County Almanac has been not only an inspiration, but an object of careful study. I hope that these es says will begin the long overdue process of exploring its intrica cies and sounding its depths. As with any work which so sweep ingly reconstructs our experience, A Sand County Almanac also recasts our questions. Most of all, I hope that this volume will press a little further into the philosophical terra incognita toward which Leopold's legacy so alluringly draws us. It was in the spring of 1971 that Robert Ramlow, formerly a stu dent in my course History of Ancient Greek Philosophy, sug gested I read A Sand County Almanac by AIdo Leopold. He offered to lend me his copy. I was preparing to teach a new course called "Environmental Ethics" at Wisconsin State Univer sity-Stevens Point, and had no syllabus and no textbooks. (In retrospect, I should not have been so surprised to discover that there was no established way of proceeding or model curriculum to follow. As it now appears, mine was the first philosophy course of its kind ever offered.) I was an expatriate Southerner, fresh from the pitched battles of the Civil Rights struggle in Memphis, Tennessee, and I had heard of neither the book nor its author. I wondered what good Vll Preface an "almanac" written by someone who for all I knew might have been a farmer, could possibly do me) a philosopher steeped in the Classics, as I desperately tried to build a strange new ethics course from the ground up. Although he found it difficult to say just what sort of book it was, Bob assured me that I would find reading A Sand County Almanac very worthwhile. I trusted his judgment; he was a senior majoring in Resource Management for Environmental Quality and surely knew more about these things than 1. Besides, I was staring into the yawning emptiness of a sixteen-week semester, commencing in just three short months, so I could ill afford to leave any stone unturned in my search for suitable literature. When I joined the faculty of a state college in the central sand country ofW isconsin as instructor of philosophy in 1969, the en vironment was under wholesale assault from every direction with no surcease in sight. Civil Rights was a cause already won in the republic of ideas and in the courts (if not on Main Street in Memphis). The war in Vietnam would eventually end-one way or another, sooner or later. On the other hand, the "envi ronmental crisis" (as it was then called) appeared to be ubiq uitous in scope, gargantuan in scale, and protracted in duration. Its dimensions-and character-appeared to me to shake West ern cultural values and beliefs to the foundations. To blame greedy capitalists, big business, complicitous poli ticians, and bureaucratic insouciance for the worsening envi ronmental malaise, to me seemed too facile-as well as too fashionable. The causes of the environmental crisis were diffuse, insidious, and synergistic. It was rooted in our whole way of doing things-modern technology-and our basic values-hu manism and the summum bonum of human happiness, defined as pleasure and measured by money and material accumulation. I was a concerned citizen, but I was also, more particularly, a challenged philosopher. I asked myself how, as a philosopher, I could contribute to a rethinking of human nature and a recon struction of human values to help bring them into line with the relatively new ideas about the nature of the environment emerg ing from ecology and the New Physics. Then, perhaps, we could gradually begin to adjust ourselves to the ecological exigencies Vlll Preface and environmental limitations which were beginning to make themselves palpably plain. Anything short of a philosophical overhaul of prevailing attitudes and values toward nature seemed to me then, as now, to treat the symptoms of the maladaptation of global civilization to the planet-not the disease itself. I found other more-or-Iess suitable texts for my course in envi ronmental ethics during the summer of 1971, but, while the other texts shufHed in and out, A Sand County Almanac remains at the core of my curriculum sixteen years later. By a sort of spon taneous generation, other courses in environmental ethics and related subjects sprang up at colleges and universities here and there. The focus of my own philosophical efforts shifted gradu ally from pedagogy to helping build a literature in this new "field." Aido Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, however, con tinued to inspire and inform my thought. Leopold always seemed to have the right intuitions, to pe thinking in the right direc tions. But his ideas were so compactly expressed that their full implications were not evident. I tried to unpack and air out Leopold's fertile thought in the rapidly expanding debate (most of which was carried on in the journal Environmental Ethics founded by Eugene C. Hargrove) that surrounded philosophical issues in environmental ethics: anthropocentric vs. nonanthro pocentric value theory, moral atomism vs. moral holism, the rela tion of ecological fact to environmental value, and so on. This book provides me with an opportunity to share with a larger audience one of my previously published articles on Leopold's monumental effect on modern environmental aware ness and an occasion more directly to write a sustained and thor ough philosophical analysis of his seminal contribution to what has now become a well-established subdiscipline of academic philosophy. I am honored to be able to place my essays alongside those of the distinguished authors included here. I have tried to fit all the essays together to form a coherent book-a chorus of distinct voices blended into a harmonious whole. As such, they are intended to enrich and extend a reading of Leopold's classic. I thank all the contributors to this volume for their diligence, patience, and cooperation throughout the assembly process. ix
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