Literary Rualism (Part XLVIII): Barbara Kingsolver's introduction to Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac

Aldo Leopold Shack, near Baraboo, Sauk County, WI
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

A few weeks ago, on a field trip from the Rural Sociological Society's Annual Meeting in Madison, Wisconsin, I visited Aldo Leopold's shack in Sauk County, Wisconsin.  This is where Leopold's book, A Sand County Almanac, is set. Leopold wanted land in one of the sand counties, so designated, because the soil had become so degraded by how it had been farmed.   What I want to do here is highlight some bits from the new introduction by Barbara Kingsolver:  

After a reverent passage on wild places, [Leopold] concludes: “It is here that we seek—and still find—our meat from God.” The use of “meat” and “God” in a metaphor for deep satisfaction might irk some modern environmentalists, but the words will find purchase in the hearts of rural readers who are weary of being maligned for their loyalties to meat and God. Weary, also, of urban land-saviors who look to nature for spiritual balm or recreation, and presume a moral high ground over the folks who literally owe their survival to the land. People who hunt and fish to help stock their freezers are astute naturalists, of necessity, and most farmers are well aware that the fields and forests they steward are home not just to crops but to bluebirds and foxes, spring wildflowers and winter wrens. It’s hard to endure ham-fisted judgments against livestock slaughter and crop-spraying from people who have no fields to shepherd or weeds to fight. 

We listen and take our truths—all of us—from people we trust, who know us and have our interests at heart. This is a built-in bias of the human psyche, and the crux of the fix we’re in as we stand in nations divided against themselves. As long as we live in entirely separate worlds, without comprehension of the others’ language or daily grinds, the door between us is sealed. Not a word will pass from one side to the other. 

I’m unusually preoccupied with this deadlock, as an environmentalist who is also a country girl, raised in rural Kentucky, living now on a farm in the Appalachian Mountains. I love this landscape and my neighbors, but I can tell you that it has never been harder to be a rural person in America. Employment is scarce, schools are under-resourced, doctors and other crucial services are overstretched or nonexistent. The main streets of our little towns are rows of shuttered local businesses, all bankrupted by internet sales and box stores. Farm incomes have bottomed out, and just about every economic mover, from industrial employers to airline hubs to professional baseball leagues, have pulled out of the nation’s less-populous regions to concentrate their benefits in cities. Out here in the heartlands we’re still raising kids and crops to feed a nation’s appetites for food and labor, but we’re feeling pretty lonely about it. And invisible. Some 40 percent of Americans live in places that aren’t cities, but we show up virtually nowhere in American TV shows, movies, or major journalism. These are made in cities, by city people. If rural folk appear in mainstream culture, it’s generally in a voyeuristic hit-and-run piece on addiction and poverty, or a degrading caricature intended as entertainment. 

Imagine, then, the novelty of reading A Sand County Almanac, a rural man’s earnest, exultant accounting of his life in the country. He’s not singing his praises to some untouched parcel of pricey wilderness real estate; it’s just a worn-out little farm. Most of its native glory was driven out by previous owners who overcropped its topsoil down to naked sand, then abandoned it with debts to the bank. (xv-xvii)

And I love this next excerpt for its explicit reference to socioeconomic class: 

A written voice is an artifice, of course, even in nonfiction. It occurred to me to wonder whether this book’s class-crossing accessibility was a conscious, crafted choice. A look into his archives reveals a more complicated Aldo Leopold than the cheerful fellow who greets us from his “sand farm.” As an outdoorsy Iowa boy, he shipped off to the newly created forestry school at Yale, then wrote wistful letters home describing the nearby woods where he sought refuge from the classroom. And as early as that, he sounded less like a duck hunter than a sophisticated naturalist. From there, a forestry career took him to a wild and woolly West (in 1909, Arizona was not yet a state) where he climbed mountains on foot and horseback, carrying a sidearm as protection against bears and wolves. He assessed oaks and pines for the board-feet of lumber they contained, and he gradually came to see the forest behind the trees, with unprecedented clarity. Rising through the ranks of the U.S. Forest Service, he developed a comprehensive land-management program for the Grand Canyon and other important wilderness areas, and he applied his remarkable insights on predator-prey interactions to new theories of game and fish management. Eventually he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin as its first professor of wildlife management, to spend the rest of his life as a conservationist, educator, and founding father of modern environmental ethics and the science of ecology. It is remarkably to his credit that Leopold compressed this master class for all time into readable prose that glows with ease and optimism. He knew that compromises between humans and our habitat would never be simple. (pp. xviii-xix). 

The outhouse, so well designed that Leopold 
called it the Parthenon.

Then there's this about the character of rural folks and their relationship to urban folks: 

His gift was to wear his rural roots and humility on his sleeve, and respect the full range of his audience, wherever they lived—a knack that we modern environmentalists have largely lost. He knew how to talk to the good ol’ boys. 

In the heat of modern culture wars, a voice like this could risk getting canceled. Readers quick to judge might just see guns and camo. Some of his language might mark him as old-school, a product of the same era as the cabal of elderly men who now impose mine-and-drill politics on many nations—that is, the time when the earth’s resources seemed in endless supply. Like those men, Leopold was well-churched in the notion of earth-as-property. But unlike them, he found his way to a nuanced idea of the planet as an autonomous collection of lives. He managed to be more inclusive than the best of us.  (p. xix).  

 * * * 

For the urban reader, I hope you will let down your guard with this man as he sits on his rock in the stream, waiting for his trout to rise. If you take him for a redneck, listen anyway, because he’s wiser than most any two of us put together. He may help you see past the frustrating divides that plague the awfullest failure of our day, as we try to reconcile human subsistence with the needs of our damaged biological home. If you’ve lost all hope of finding a common language for that conversation, you might well find it here. (p xx) 

It's a fitting introduction for a classic and a staple of the conservation movement.  The book was first published in 1949, a year after Leopold died helping fight a wildfire near his shack--a shack which, by the way, had been the chicken coop for he farm's prior owner.  That owner had gotten so frustrated with trying to cultivate the land, that he burned his house down before selling the property.