A Picture Perfect World

I can’t stop thinking about photographs and my inclination to take photographs. I was semi-hoping that reading Home Economics would get some of Leopold out of my head, but sadly it just ended up making me think more about A Sand County Almanac.

This week I took a walk the night of the full moon. It was, of course, relatively late at night so I found that I couldn’t get totally swept up and lost in the landscape because to do so might somehow draw danger to me, but the moon was insanely pretty. It was so bright, it made the normally black sky turn blue, and the normally white clouds turn gray and stormy. The blue of the sky made the orange on the trees stand out, even more so than they do during the day. The sky and the leaves seemed to be the only colors within a colorless landscape, a landscape that had already given itself over to the shadows and the darkness. I remember describing this walk to a friend of mine and she kept saying that I should have taken my camera, but I didn’t find myself agreeing with her. I found myself questioning her, questioning why I took photographs and what happened to my photographs after I had taken them. I found myself thinking that if I had taken my camera I would have been out for that perfect shot which I could later sell to someone in the form of a note card or enter it into a contest and possibly earn some money from it that way.

My mother asked me to take pictures of a particularly pretty bush this weekend and I found myself unwilling to do it, but unable to explain to her why. I think I understand now. I think I was reluctant because photography, for me, has become about money. Therefore when I get behind my camera I am seeing things in terms of their economic value. I’m putting a price on these natural sights, sights that people can see for free and sights, which, in my opinion, shouldn’t necessarily have a price, put upon them. When I take a walk I am frequently asked why I didn’t take any pictures and I think my response is something like Leopold describes in one of his essays: “But we who seek wilderness travel for sport are foiled when we are forced to compete with mechanized substitutes” (193). I believe that Leopold is trying to say that we don’t seem to be able to enjoy true wilderness when we have things like cars, trains, and big RVs. To not have these things looks absurd and he says, “It is footless to execute a portage to the tune of motor launches, or to turn out your bellemare in the pasture of a summer hotel. It is better to stay at home.” You can’t get the experience which you are craving because others are not getting it either. They are not getting it because of these machines. I am not getting to observe nature in the way that I would like because my camera is one of these machines. It keeps me separated, within the human fold, thinking economically or aesthetically, but not uniquely. When I talk a walk I don’t want to have to turn every thought, every moment, every picture into something economical. At the very least I don’t want to be forced to think about its economic weight consciously. It’s like Leopold says, “Recreation is valuable in proportion to the intensity of its experiences, and to the degree to which it differs from and contrasts with workaday life.” (194). In other words, the true value of recreation is not how much money it can get you. It’s not something that should be pursued in terms of economic gain, but which frequently is. It’s something that should bring you closer to nature, and not farther from it.

Conquering

Because I feel as though my honors thesis has usurped my life in very twisted ways, I chose to work on it instead of going for a walk or sitting outside without thinking. I'd invariably end up thinking about my thesis anyway thus defeating the purpose of said excursion. That said, I did spend inordinate amounts of time starting out my window trying to not think about my thesis and instead picturing myself putting the numerous piles of leaves next to my building in giant mounds and jumping in them. I wanted to do something to the leaves and I wasn't quite sure of what that something was, only that they needed to somehow become within my power. It was interesting how when a project or concept becomes overwhelming, we as humans decide to gain power over something insignificant and meaningless like my leaves...but I digress. So I started back on my little tangent about conquering. Leopold says "the conqueror role is eventually self-defeating. Why? Because it is implicit in such a role that the conqueror knows, ex cathedra, just what makes the community clock tick, and just what and who is valuable, and what and who is worthless, in community life." (204) I love this quote for many reasons. The first of which being that it is more extraordinarily true, and seems like something that would be obvious, but for obvious reasons is not. What I mean is: the very mindset of the conqueror, of someone who knows all, is completely conducive to overlooking the role of the self, in this case conqueror, in terms of the larger picture that includes the conquered. I looked up ex cathedra and found it to mean "from the chair" specific to the name of the chair that bishops used to sit in when they gave orders to the masses. The conqueror knows everything implicitly, or thinks she does, and must therefore be correct in conquering.

I read a book a while back for a class called Guns, Germs, and Steel (Jared Diamond. It's on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393061310/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1288036372&sr=8-1) which is actually a terribly boring account of the various ways in which humanity has perpetually conquered other peoples and a detailed historical account of how it was and was not done. Interestingly, the conquerors (usually Europeans) ended up succeeding but not with their own methods; they succeeded because of side effects of things they were trying to do and ultimately failed to do. As unrelated as this seems, this made me think about the ways in which we as humans try to conquer our environment and mould it to our own uses and the things we achieve as ultimately happy accidents that leave behind unforseen carnage and destruction.

What Leopold doesn't answer for me is how we stop attempting to conquer and what the difference is between conquering and husbandry of the land. Husbandry, as it's been described to me anyway, is complete and perfect care of another being, typically livestock on a farm, to the point that the husband, usually a farmer, has utter responsibility for the animals. If we are to take responsibility for nature, as her husbands in a way, are we not attempting a different sort of conquering? Is the complete understanding and absolute care for the purpose of well-being of nature somehow a good version of conquering? Can conquering be good the way he has described it?

Humen vs. Animals.

The weather has been very strange for the last few weeks. Then again, this is not so strange for Maine. When I went for my walk, it looked beautiful and warm outside, but instead it was windy and bitterly cold. I felt a little silly in my winter jacket and hat so early in the season.

I had read both the Berry reading and the article for my walk, so I thought about both of these texts on my walk (since I did not want to lift my head up in fear of the biting wind). Back when I was younger and lived in central Pennsylvania, I rarely heard any of the people whom I was in direct contact with speak about pollution or other environmental issues. In Berry's first essay, he had written that "The people who want clean air, clear streams, and wild forests, prairies, and deserts are the people who no longer have them" (7). Is this why I did not hear about the fight for the environment in beautiful Pennsylvania? I had lived in a farming community; there were no mills nor factories for about a hundred (or more) miles. Perhaps the people who are concerned about environmental issues really are the people who live in the areas like cities. There are communities where pollution is a very small concern because either the people in the area do not live or make their living in ways that significantly harm the land, air, or water.

This idea then made me think about the article about the pastoral. Prior to reading the article, my understanding of the pastoral was basically the desire to go back to a more simple life in nature (like "Walden"). Could the desire to help the environment be connected to the pastoral? Tourists come to Maine from the city (New York or Massachusetts normally) just to see the leaves change. I could not imagine living in an area where there basically were not seasons. Then again, city folk might hate the idea of living in a place where there was not a large amount of business.

Berry has the argument that pure nature is not good for humans to live in. I feel that I agree with this argument strongly. In this day and age, humans are very different from animals. I know that Leopold would argue that humans are very animal-like, however I feel that humans are now more "people" than "animals." Survival instincts do not come as easily to a person living in 2010 than they may have for a person living in Leopold's time. A person living in a very natural environment, similar to the one I grew up in, might have more survival instincts than say a person from New York City, however I feel that neither would survive even half as well as an animal in the wilderness. To say that we are not different from animals seems somewhat naive to me. Although we should not denounce our animal-side all together (it is not good to live in a purely human world, as Berry points out), I feel that it is important to recognize that humans are no longer animals. This recognition alone might in fact help environmentalists evaluate our impact on the world and nature and how to make the least harmful impact we can.

Memory Maker

Leopold does a great job of making his readers think about nature in terms of not just the physical but the mental. Leopold brings to light the idea that our imagination and memory can hold more possibilities and power than many of our other physical relations to the world. With my nature walk this week, it was unusual, one because I was actually driving not walking and two because I found myself at a loss for words. I traveled to Greenville for my best friend’s 21st birthday and on the way there I found myself thinking about our class (no this doesn’t happen everywhere and yes I am a dork). As we came into the actual town of Greenville you have travel down a long hill. This hill overlooks the town of Greenville, Moosehead Lake, and miles upon miles further in every direction. I thought to myself how pretty this scene was and how it looked like the “perfect postcard”. After saying this I wondered, if I put this scene on a postcard, if I took a picture of it, what am I really capturing? Absolutely nothing. I had automatically seen something so pretty and thought of how I could make it mine, take it with me and keep it. I never thought that simply seeing this beautiful sight was enough.

As Leopold discusses, there is a form of appreciation for the land that can be as powerful as being there physically. Mental appreciation is not something many people can grasp considering we have an outrageous number of tourists attractions. These are places of beautiful nature that we have taken and transformed by imposing our own idea of “nature” on it. In order to better appreciate nature, Leopold suggests a kind of “wisdom” that we could employ. “It is the part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it. To return not only spoils a trip, but tarnishes a memory. It is only in the mind that shining adventure remains forever bright. (141)” The more beautiful we claim a piece of land, of nature, to be, the more people have traveled to see it, thus ruining the spot with overflow of human presence. When we see a place only once, we retain this as a special memory, our imagination creating an even grander place, setting it apart from other experiences and creating a more powerful place for us. How we “see” nature is changed in this sense, we respect it more, we cherish that memory and the place because we never return.

Leopold poses the question, “who is the more thoroughly acquainted with the world in which he lives?” (p.78) I kept this question in mind when I set out for my walk to the cascades. It is a small river, almost a brook, behind the Farmington fairgrounds. I discovered it when I lived behind the fairgrounds. It was and still is a place that my friends and I often visit. I love this place because although there is a physical presence of people, a trail and a fire pit, the noises of town are drowned out by the sound of the river and the shroud of tall pines.

It was really the entire first passage in Leopold’s chapter home range that I kept in mind on my walk.

“The wild things that live on my farm are reluctant to tell me, in so many words, how much of my township is included with their daily or nightly beat.”

I started my walk on my street; it is in town there is a doctors office, houses, and even a market. I thought about the animals that I’ve seen in the neighbor hood; squirrels, skunks, raccoons, stray cats make up the majority of the wild life. As I walk further from my street there are less and less houses. Do these animals still venture this far from what I think their world is? As I turn up the road towards the cascades all the houses are on the left, the right side is wooded. I reach my destination and head down the trail. Is this where the skunks or raccoons live? Or do they live in town? I really don’t think I’ll ever know. But it’s fun to think about.

As I looked around I couldn’t see any animals. But I couldn’t help but think they are there. Whether perched in the tree or peering through underbrush they could see me and I could not see them. I’m thinking that an animal is more thoroughly acquainted within his world. We spend so much time obtaining things we really don’t need and go blundering about the world without much thought to what is going on around you. And yet when you stop and realize that even a short walk between home and woods, you pass through many worlds of many creatures.

After this weeks wind many leaves have fallen off the trees. I think it’s kind of a bummer. I had friends come up for a visit from the Portland area that were shocked at how many leaves had fallen already. They said that most of the leaves were still on the trees down there. Bummer! The lack of leaves made the pines stand out even more then normal. Winter is right around the corner! And because of that it was quite chilly so I did not hang out there long. But overall the walk there and back, with Leopold’s question in the back of my head, opened my thoughts to new idea, which unfortunately left me with questions I may never know. I feel like I can compare the way I feel to the science of Leopold’s era in which he states, “science knows little about home range: how big it is at various seasons, what food and cover it must include, when and how it is defended against trespass, and whether ownership is an individual, family, or group affair.” P.81 Today I’m sure science has a much better understanding, but I still don’t.

Leopold, the Mountain and Wolves

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither wolf nor mountain agreed with such a view” (130). Walking along in Farmington it is hard to imagine wolves. It is hard to feel how powerful and awesome they really are. When I was a kid I spent some time fascinated by them. By dad and my grandmother live on Verona Island here in Maine and I spent every weekend visiting. It was normal for us to walk along a small wood trail between the two homes but not at night. At night the woods were still fairly wild and belonged to bears, coyotes and wolves. It was dangerous to walk through them then.

I remember one evening when my grandmother walked through the woods to see my dad. It was evening and the sun was almost down. That was when we saw what we at first thought was a dog. It was big and furry and black. Too big to be a dog but it had ears and four paws and looked like a dog. It was a wolf stalking around our house. It ambled on along into the woods just as my grandmother reached the house. Needless to say she did not go back through the woods.
I can understand that people fear what they don’t understand and they certainly don’t understand wolves. Maybe that is why they have been hunted to near extinction. But when I see one it doesn’t even cross my mind that we should shoot it. As scary as they can be, especially when they howl, they are also beautiful and loyal. They hunt in packs and mate for life. They play games with their pups for food. And they grieve when their pack members die. In some ways they are more like us than we realize. I can forgive Leopold for his folly in killing this wolf but I don’t think I can forgive the rest of the world for nearly destroying something so amazing.

Wolves will almost never attack a human unless provoked, the pack shares responsibility for the pups, only the alpha male and female of the pack have pups, when a whole pack works together they can easily take down a large animal such as a moose and they have a clear hierarchical social order that they live by but most packs are made of one family.

Maybe I don’t understand the accord that the mountain and woods have that Leopold describes in his passage but like the mountain I certainly know that they are important. I think Leopold takes full advantage of this story in this essay. I liked how he should that nature sometimes knows things we don’t but saying that the mountain did not agree with his take on fewer wolves. That statement worked well because in the end it was the mountain that suffered first from the loss of the wolves. The mountain was destroyed by the number of deer trying to eat the vegetation and wearing trails all over the place. Then the destruction continued as the deer died out from hunger because there were so many of them and no predators to keep their numbers low. Leopold does an excellent job of showing people that even animals we don’t fully understand and may be afraid of are helpful to the environment and to humans as well. Nature is in complete balance until we interfere too far. In this case the loss of the wolves destroyed mountains and deer. Who knows what other harm could have been caused by the loss of this one predator?

Entitlement

(Apologies for this being so late. Sadface.)

Technically I was supposed to have written this before the holiday weekend, but since I didn't and am writing it now on this dark Saturday night, I'll go ahead and talk about a walk I took while off campus for the weekend in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

For those not in the know (like me, before this lovely little trip south), Gloucester is a port city. Which means when I woke up from sleeping on the floor in my friend's parents' addition Saturday morning, I immediately felt the need to go for a walk along the coast.

Having grown up in San Diego, barely a 20 minute drive from the coast, being in Farmington is always a little torturous. I love the ocean. Things don't quite feel right when I can't jump in my car and drive to the beach on a whim. So going on this walk last week was quite a treat. Here was this ocean, different from the one I was accustomed to, the one I claimed as my own, my rightful habitat. But it would do.

This got me thinking about entitlement and how... human that feeling/emotion/state of being is. And in reading Leopold, when he humanizes and personifies animals to make them more relatable, this feeling of entitlement is inescapable, especially in the opening essay: "The mouse is a sober citizen who knows that grass grows in order that mice may store it as underground haystacks, and that snow falls in order that mice may build subways from stack to stack: supply, demand, and transport all neatly organized" (4). Here, Leopold talks about the mouse as a sort of straight-laced business man, intently focused on the supply and demand aspects of his life and the collection of grass. Why else would the grass grow? To the mouse, this fact is the most natural thing in the world, nearly akin to instinct--the difference being that the mouse knows these things, and they are not gained from intuition. It's a fact, one known and learned but taken for granted, and it becomes a sense of entitlement.

The same holds true for the hawk in the next paragraph: "The rough-leg has no opinion why grass grows, but he is well aware that snow melts in order that hawks may again catch mice" (4). While less involved than the example of personification of the mouse, the hawk shares the same entitlement. Of course it thaws so hawks might catch mice to eat! Why else would it?

This is an interesting and insightful move on Leopold's part. Entitlement is one of the earliest and oldest of human sensibilities. From a young age we expect things will happen; that our parents will feed us, clothe us, love us. It's natural, a given fact, and as we grow older it only seems to grow more entrenched and cover a wider variety of things. Rarely do we as 21st century Americans question where food, clothing, education, and even technology comes from. These are merely facts, taken for granted; of course we are entitled to these things. And I think it interesting that Leopold chooses to highlight this among the animal world as well so early in his book. He is upfront about it while drawing subtle attention to our own human ability to take things for granted. And it is only through a sudden disruption or an absence of these things that we begin to pay more attention to them--whether it be a mouse and his snow, or a SoCal girl and her ocean.