Leopold, There's a Fly In My Biota!

Sometimes I try to do my homework outside, but even if I am sitting beneath the most ideal tree in the middle of a two-acre field, I can only focus on most work for a few minutes before I am on my stomach staring at an ant walking up and down the length of my pen. I am thoroughly convinced, however, that A Sand County Almanac was meant to be read outside. I came to this conclusion while reading Part II, sitting in the middle of one of Bangor's many obscure recreational parks. Leopold's vast descriptions of times and places are so primal they are strangely familiar, but now and then they seem so absolutely foreign that, when discovered outside, you become a witness to the same natural energy that runs through his prose. While reading this last assignment, I felt more focused being slowly covered with falling leaves from an old Elm tree than I might have been in the most silent and confined library study cell.

On this particular outside study-session, when what may have been the last living no-see-um of the year silently crash-landed on a page in the middle of "Odyssey," instead of brushing him away as a mere distraction, I felt as though I was being rewarded with an "X" carrying visitor. As I took a few minutes to closely study his six tiny legs trudging over the page, I smiled, noticing that the text he walked on was coincidentally Leopold's description of life's eternal cycle. I read this passage as the little guy aimlessly plodded along:

"For every atom lost to the sea, the prairie pulls another out of the decaying rocks. The only certain truth is that its creatures must suck hard, live fast, and die often, lest its losses exceed its gains" (107).

I telepathically unloaded all the fresh ideas and new perspectives in my head to the bug. I tried to consider how his existence coincided with my own, how he came to be in Bangor and how he fit into his own little habitat, and how--thanks to our chance meeting--he was now part of my life. The part of his natural cycle where he took a detour on the pages of my book might not have had much to do with depositing atom "X" back to the sea, but he had at least made an impact on me intellectually. Minutes of my consciousness were spent improving my ecological worldview all because he happened to be in a park in Bangor when I was in the mood to wax philosophical about tiny insects. This connection made me realize that I understood the text on a level unlike anything I've read before. I was reading carefully edited, deliberately crafted human ideas about nature and combining them--in real-time--with a completely objective element in nature. Did I come up with any of my own profound insights because of it? Not exactly, but rather than having an "aha" experience I think I was able to take all of the information that Leopold was firing at me and apply it to my own environmental philosophy. At the end of the day, I think that this is one thing Leopold would have wanted all of his readers to do.