In 1928, the conservationist and philosopher Aldo Leopold lent my great-grandparents his car to use for their honeymoon.
The middle section of Leopold’s influential collection of essays, A Sand County Almanac, is simply called ‘Sketches Here and There’. For me, this title evokes much of what is admirable about Leopold’s philosophy and his way of writing. Each centring on a particular environmental event or change, all the essays in the Almanac maintain a deft lyricism—a gentle, reassuring rise and fall in tone that you can even hear in just the three words ‘Sketches Here and There’—yet are still cutting, direct, and ironic. They are also short—sometimes less than a page long.
I think this a model to be followed, but some disagree. The University of Wisconsin, where Leopold worked for much of his life and who published his mammoth textbook on ecology (and thus, dare I say, the following quote belies a financial interest), contend that ‘although A Sand Country Almanac is doubtless Leopold's most popular book, Game Management may well be his most important’.
I find that hard to believe. Despite their brevity, the essays in the Almanac have an undeniable staying power. Leopold seems to effortlessly strike that balance—one much of the New Nature Writing from the US and UK occasionally fails to—between wonder and melancholy, those two basic modes of environmental thought.
However, he has become particularly associated with the development of the latter—that which has come to be known as ‘eco-grief’ or ‘solastalgia’—because of his personal accounts in the Almanac of the American Midwest’s crippled ecosystems.
The work of the contemporary, full-blown Solastalgists is (perhaps unsurprisingly) depressing. I also often find it to be more than a little bit patronizing: ‘Why aren’t we on the floor doubled up in pain at our capacity for industrial scale genocide of the world’s species?’1 This is a question to which Leopold would be sympathetic, but he provides two quick answers: 1. ‘For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. The Cro-Magnon who slew the last mammoth thought only of steaks’2 and 2. ‘Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty’3.
There’s still a lot to like in this article on contemporary eco-grief, published in Environmental Humanities. Nonetheless, Leopold’s answers show that assuming that the lack of suitable collective grieving must be a result of ‘denial and repression’, as the article says, simply does not make sense in this case. It isn’t really surprising, when faced with this new and un-pretty (sometimes even invisible) event, that we find it difficult to think much at all.
The article brings up the passenger pigeon—which went extinct in 1899—as a particular example and implies that the history of suitably ‘penitential’ mourning for species like this pretty much only started in 2011 with the introduction of the Remembrance Day for Lost Species.
Not quite. In 1941, seventy years before, my great-grandfather told the conservationist and designer Phil Sander that he should attend a particular meeting of bird experts in Racine, Wisconsin. At this meeting, Sander was the one who took charge of designing a public monument to the passenger pigeon. The inscription on the monument, finally constructed at Wyalusing State Park in 1947, is just as impactful now as it must have been then: ‘This species’, it reads, ‘became extinct through the avarice and thoughtlessness of man’. Equally affecting, and potentially more influential, is Leopold’s reflection on it, published two years later in the Almanac as one of his ‘Sketches Here and There’: ‘We have erected a monument to commemorate the funeral of a species. It symbolizes our sorrow’4.
What’s clear about this near-decade-long sequence, however, was that this was not the kind of performative, self-flagellating exercise that things like this are often portrayed as (and, I concede, sometimes actually are). Sander’s own account of the process is largely a jumble of names, mostly of state-level conservation higher-ups like my great-grandfather, and thus difficult to read. Yet, what comes across, sometimes vividly, is that in that decade—marked as well by great loss of human life— the creation of the monument brought ‘warmth’, ‘inspiration’, and ‘joy’ to those who, in that particular time in America, played an outsized role in managing that ecosystem with which the passenger pigeon had once been entwined. They saw themselves, rightly or wrongly, as members of an ‘enlightened minority’5 who knew what had to be done and who took responsibility.
The writer Richard Smyth points out that the recognition of environmental loss can, equally, spur a dangerous retreat into an insular, pastoralist vision. He picks out the English novelist Paul Kingsnorth—who, interestingly, is the author of the blurb on the Penguin Classics Edition of the Almanac—as an example.
I actually found Kingsnorth’s own reflections on Leopold compelling. And he convincingly distils Leopold’s work: ‘a call for a sane and moral relationship between human civilisation and the rest of life on Earth’. However, like Smyth, I’m wary of Kingsnorth’s idea of the nefarious ‘machine’, and the replacement of Leopold’s ‘land ethic’ with a ‘horrorcene ethic’.
So, the tones of despair— a feeling probably unknown to Leopold— in the ‘horrorcene ethic’, in ‘why do we not mourn?’ and in ‘how much more will we burn?’6 make these the wrong questions for us to ask, or rather the wrong way of asking them. Leopold’s question is better: ‘just what and whom do we love?’7. I think that the adage in environmental academia these days, though slightly grandiose, is just an extension of this. We should, it goes, cultivate ‘the arts of living on a damaged planet’. I don’t feel qualified to do that just yet, but I’m happy to borrow from Leopold in the meantime—perhaps only hoping to revive a family tradition. It’s time to try making sketches here and there.
From Jo Confino in the Guardian, cited in the article from Environmental Humanities.
In the 2020 Penguin Classics Edition, this is on page 83
Likewise, page 72
Page 82
From the introduction to the Almanac by Dale Jamieson, page xxii
From Kingsnorth’s piece ‘Life vs The Machine’
Almanac, page 157