by Clara Nibbelink
“That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.”
—Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949
When I first read this meditation by Aldo Leopold, I was struck by this 20th century hunter, woodsman and ecologist’s ability to put into words how I felt about the land. This was not the first encounter I’d had with authors whose works made me feel less alone in my deep sense of connection to the natural world (e.g., Wendell Berry, Terry Tempest Williams, Janisse Ray, Ed Abbey, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Richard Powers). I marveled at their power to put into words feelings as big as wildness.
This heart imperative I felt–the need to reach out and touch a tree–begat my career shift to the natural sciences, and yet for the longest time I shied away from putting my experiences with nature into words. Even more so as I approached my current master’s program in forest ecophysiology (under the mentorship of Dr. Dan Johnson, tree ecophysiologist to the stars, never afraid of anything too “out there”): Fearful that my deep sense of connection to the land would seem too “out there,” I aimed to frame my encounters with plants as scientifically as possible.
Imagine my surprise when the first semester of my master’s program in the hard sciences, I was tasked with coaching students to do the exact thing I thought I couldn’t in this discipline: write the land with love. In a series of journal entries and a book report on A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, undergraduate students in the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources were asked to reflect on their own experiences in nature, and how the concepts they were learning in class made them perceive these experiences in a new or different light.
Suddenly, I was not only teaching how one technically writes compelling narratives rooted in both personal truth and scientific fact, but making the case for why writing this way matters in the world of habitat management. With the tools I was learning in my WIPP 7001 course in writing-intensive pedagogy–5 minute teaches, question-focused feedback, providing model examples–I worked through these questions alongside the students. How does one choose the “best” memory to illustrate a point about conservation? How does one root through the history of game management to understand one’s own feelings about eating meat?
It was uncanny—how beautifully what I was learning about teaching writing in WIPP 7001 correlated with what I was learning about environmental narrative as a WIP TA. A cornerstone of WIP is the invitation for teachers to read student work not as “student writing” prone to error, but to respect students as authors in their own right (i.e., “The Phenomenology of Error” by Joseph M. Williams, 1981, who said “if we read any text the way we read freshman essays, we will find many of the same kind of errors we routinely expect…but if…we could make the ordinary kind of contract with those texts that we make with other kinds of texts, then we could find many fewer errors.”). As I read student journals reflecting on the people in their life—parents, grandparents, teachers—who modeled love for the land, I felt a dawning joy: We are each capable of powerful authorship. The stories we tell have the potential to ripple outward.
“For all are restrained by an ironbound taboo which decrees that the construction of instruments is the domain of science, while the detection of harmony is the domain of poets.”
—Aldo Leopold, “Song of the Gavilan,” in A Sand County Almanac, 1949
Aldo Leopold is credited with creating the field of wildlife management, at a time when ecosystems were not so much managed for the benefit of the whole but for the parts: game species above all (see “Aldo Leopold,” Wikipedia.org.). It’s thanks to his work in cross-disciplinary ecology, including his seminal nature writing—over 2 million copies of A Sand County Almanac sold since 1949—that in the United States today, we aim to manage not just for the turkey, but for the river, the soil, and the forest, too.
If we are the turkey, the forest we call home is on fire. Graduates of Warnell will face careers in habitat management navigating challenges unlike any encountered in living memory due to climate change. Warnell, the only non-Franklin College department to participate in the Writing Intensive Program, is training students to tell the story of why the landscape matters to them. Because, as every good habitat manager knows, balancing the stories of the stakeholders matters just as much to every decision as does the science.
It is no small thing, using our words to draw hearts closer to ecology. One could say that neither science nor management could exist without this nature-love, and our ability to communicate it. Across vast prairies of difference, our stories might reach each other. We might heed the call.
All pictures by the post’s author, Clara Nibbelink