"One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise."
- Aldo Leopold ("The Round River," collected in A Sand County Almanac)
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When I was a kid, I loved the almanac. I don't remember where they came from, but every couple of years a new one would appear in the house, and as soon as I got my hands on it, it moved into my room and anybody who wanted to look stuff up in it after that needed to see me first.
A while back I raised the question: Is there still room on the shelf for an almanac? in reference to the World Almanac for Kids.
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(Let Us Know Your Comment: In addition to being a brilliant scientist, did you know that Benjamin was also an outspoken critic against the evils of slavery in his day?)
I And The Bird #32 is up on Sand Creek Almanac
An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise."
Good observation! That is one reason I love the Framing Science blog so much. They have willingly engaged in the eternal struggle of trying to find ways to tell people things they don't want to hear! A very noble cause!
Dave Briggs :~)
Yes...and no. One of the benefits of a good ecological education is the ability to see beyond the wounds. At some point in your education, you see a ruined Eden. But hopefully, at some later point, you realise that there never was an Eden, that North America is recovering from a glaciation that scoured the countryside bare, that many Neotropical forests (and North American forests, of course) were depopulated within the last 500 years.
It doesn't mean that you aren't living with the wounds, but it does mean (to me, at least) that it's legitimate to revel in the first hints of recovery.
An ecological education makes one aware that, once past the disease of humanity, Eden will build itself again.
You have to look past the conflagration to see the phoenix rising from its ashes.
Ian; I agree that there never was an Eden that we can go back to and that ecologies are dynamic, changing things. Still, I would consider events like the eradication of the American bison and anthropogenic climate change to be "wounds" akin to what Leopold was trying to get at. While life will surely continue on earth even if we pollute it to the point where our own species goes extinct, much of what we have done in our ignorance has forever changed the planet. As the author of The End of the Wild suggested, some organisms are recovering (even thriving), but at a cost to a large amount of biodiversity. Sure, there are plenty of white-tailed deer and phragmites, but we've already lost many other more delicate species.
I'm not saying this to outright contradict or ignore what you're saying, but rather to agree that there has never been an Eden, and while not expressed directly I think what Leopold wrote fits into that idea.