The botanical folio was not the only book waiting. Behind it, spine faded the color of winter oak, sat a volume I had meant to meet for years and had treated as furniture. A Sand County Almanac. Aldo Leopold. Wisconsin sand, not Ozarks limestone — and still the ridge outside my window leaned in as if it had been cited.
Leopold was a forester who learned to stop counting only board-feet. He watched a wolf die and understood that the mountain had been keeping a longer set of books than the rifle. He called that longer arithmetic a land ethic.
“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
This is not poetry dressed as science. It is a rule you can walk to the fence with. The community, in his sentence, is not a club of people. It is soil, water, plant, animal, and the human who thinks the fence is the edge of the story. Goats belong to that community. So do the oaks they browse, the spring they muddy, the wampus rumor in the draw, and the Muscovy pair who keep their own hours at the willow pond.
“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” — Aldo Leopold
Arkatype Farms is a storybook place, which tempts a person to treat the hills as scenery. Leopold will not allow it. Scenery is what you own with your eyes. Community is what can be harmed when you are not looking. A good pasture is not a warehouse of fescue. It is a conversation that includes the goat and does not end when the goat has eaten.
He asked us to think like a mountain. In this county I will settle for thinking like a ridge. A ridge remembers fire. It remembers the ice that never quite reached it and the cedar that took the glade when the fire was kept away. It remembers that a herd can heal a slope or strip it, depending on how long they stand in one shade.
“To think like a mountain.” — Aldo Leopold, from the wolf essay that taught him the longer books
Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately. The Tao Te Ching says the way does nothing, and still nothing is left undone. Leopold adds the missing chore: belong. Do not merely walk through. Do not merely let be. Stand in the community and ask whether the next act leaves the ridge more itself.
My husband will print the docket and the expo and the two-tub sermon, and he should. That is the day’s news. This desk will keep Leopold on the blotter beside the folio, and when the paper names a place, I will ask the ridge whether the name still fits.