Portraits of Nature by Aldo Leopold

Leopold sees himself as a genus Phallus of the minority that wants to maintain the dotty things of this world. He finds a received dichotomy in promote. Before we had circulateed to the point where we could raise adequacy food and produce sufficient shelter and clothing for our protection, the wild things had little forgiving value. Once we had forward motioned to a stage where we were fed, clothed, and housed and where we could adopt these things with less than subsistence-level effort, we also had the time to appreciate the things of nature. Yet, at the resembling time we found that we had progressed to a level where we were destroying those things. They achieved value and upset value at the same time.

For much of this book, Leopold reports on things ascertained in his wanderings through the different types of non-developed regions of Sand County, noting the animals he has discover and their behaviors, the plants encountered, and some of the feelings engendered in him by his wanderings. His own spiritual breeding is related to these experiences, and he uses some specific experiences as a way of saying more nearly the world and about our place in it. For instance, he cuts down an oak tree diagram for firewood and muses on the business relationship through which this tree has lived, a history reflected in the rings of the tree. The rings also indicate the traumas that occurred in the vicinity of the oak, from droughts to lightning strikes. As the saw cuts through the rings of the tree

All ethics so outlying(prenominal) evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent whiles (239).

If Leopold's philosophy could be implemented, it would make the study of the bionomics easier and more productive, merely it would even more importantly make the protection of the ecology a reality. Leopold is above all accepting of what he encounters in the wild, seeing it as in its proper place, with a reform to live that transcends narrow views of progress. The attitude he fosters in others is to urinate the same acceptance of the wild as an essential dowery in the world, with human beings only being one part of that world, components in the environment and not its conquerors.

Leopold nurtures a certain knead of mind which he sees as necessary and remove as a way of accomplishing a successful ecological correction study, and in this book he presents us with an image of this twine of mind rather than a discussion of it. His every piece as reported here contributes to the reader's sense of what it means to begin the study of the natural world and what it requires in terms of an appropriate attitude. Leopold has that attitude throughout and comments on it from time to time. It is the attitude he notes above when discussion John Muir, an attitude of "mercy for things natural, wild, and free."

In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies heed for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such (240).

Leopold is not antagonistic to progress but would require a better definition of what progress is. Progress in the modern world seems to mean whatever human beings want for themselves at the time, while Leopold would see progress as moving us closer to his goal of a land ethic that recognizes the proper balance between human interests and the interests of the land. Indeed, he does not even see this as a matter o
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