Dear colleagues,
This week would mark the 135th birthday of Aldo Leopold, one of the early and leading figures in the North American environmental conservation movement. Leopold had a somewhat conflicted and distant relationship with the church and to my knowledge no church officially commemorates him. Nonetheless, I find in Leopold’s writings helpful provocations to my Christian faith.
One of Leopold’s central ideas was that the ethical life we seek to practice in relation to one another needs to be extended to include the natural world as well. His point of departure is this: the Judeo-Christian ethic on which American culture is (as he perceived it at his time) founded is too narrow because it only concerned itself with relationships between people. He urged people to listen to prophets such as Ezekiel and Isaiah who condemned the despoliation of land and “enlarge the boundaries of their community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” But in order to truly do this, people needed to understand themselves differently: “a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”
This is not an easy transition. Leopold saw that in order to embrace this land ethic we would need to broaden our understandings of value so that they moved beyond simply economic considerations. One of my favourite essays of his is about the unseen value of a marsh—a place perhaps unattractive to many of us but of vital importance to the health of the ecosystem. Since that ecological importance doesn’t have a price, however, we become too eager to drain the marsh to farm it or build houses on it.
Leopold died in 1948. While his writing continues to be hugely influential among certain people—his book Sand County Almanac has sold millions of copies—it is no secret that we are a long way off from reaching Leopold’s goal of an ethic that truly embraces our natural world. Still, on this 135th anniversary of his birth, I find two areas of hope.
The first is the growing attention given to indigenous peoples and indigenous wisdom in this country. Undoubtedly, there is a very long way to go on this front but the growing voice of indigenous peoples in this country is unmistakeable. If you listen to these voices even a little bit, you will quickly learn how important the land is to indigenous people. Perhaps this is something that non-indigenous people in Canada can receive as we move towards reconciliation. God created this world and all that is in it: that means not just human beings but the marshlands and the animals that live in them and so much else besides. In making new room for indigenous voices to be heard, can we learn in new ways about the (non-economic) value of all of creation?
The second is the pandemic, which has pushed many people outside. While these new practices may be receding as the pandemic drags on, I wonder if there is an opportunity here for us to learn what it means to be a “plain member and citizen” of a community that includes not just our human neighbours but our neighbours in the natural world as well. Leopold would tell us that our very future depends on it.
Faithfully yours,
Jesse Zink
Principal
This message was written by Jesse Zink for this week’s Wingèd Ox, a weekly news digest distributed to the college community.