[regal-sounding music]
[brass instrument fanfare]
[snare drum]
[triumphant horns conclude song]
[swans trumpeting deep "oh-OH" call]
- Lorne Greene: There are some
who can live without wild things,
and some who cannot.
Like winds and sunsets,
wild things were taken for granted
until progress began to do away with them.
For us of the minority,
the opportunity to see geese
is more important than television.
And the chance to find a Pasqueflower
is right as inalienable as free speech.
These words sum up the driving force behind
one of the most remarkable men of the 20th century.
Aldo Leopold.
A man whose life and writings were to change
and still are changing the face of history.
A prophet whose voice we are just beginning to hear clearly.
[peaceful instrumental music]
[original music by Phil Corriveau]
[birds chirping]
It is rare when a person makes major contributions
across the whole spectrum of an area of human knowledge.
Not even Einstein or Darwin were able to do that.
But Aldo Leopold did.
The subject was ecology.
The study of living organisms and their environment.
[birds chirping, honking]
[ducks quacking]
[bird honking]
In his own way,
Leopold would transform the old nature study,
the endless classifying of organisms
into the study of the dynamic relationships
between plants, animals,
soil, water,
and perhaps most importantly... man.
[overlapping conversations, child crying]
Born in 1887,
Aldo Leopold grew up at a time
when people believed that civilization, progress,
and wild things were incompatible.
If his life had a special meaning,
a unique purpose as he saw it,
it was to demonstrate that this supposed incompatibility
between civilization and nature
was false. [electrical humming]
And that, in fact, progress carried to the extreme
would threaten human existence itself.
[chainsaw motor revving]
Aldo Leopold was no mere birds and butterfly man.
He completely immersed himself
in the new subject of ecology.
So much so that some would call him the father of it.
As a young man, we would've seen him fighting
for the acceptance of the idea
that forests can be continuously productive.
That the plow does not have to follow the ax.
In the 1930s, he was at the forefront
of the struggle to develop and implement
necessary soil conservation practices
such as contour farming.
As Leopold said,
"What good is it to win the battle in the legislature
and lose the one on the back 40?"
At a time when many species were teetering
on the brink of extinction in the United States,
Leopold almost single-handedly developed
the art and science of wildlife management.
He established a new field,
that of game restoration so that today
we can have a balance
between agriculture, hunting, fishing, and wildlife.
As the last stretches of true wilderness were disappearing,
he conceived of a need to preserve
a few such remnants intact.
The first wilderness area,
the Gila Wilderness Preserve
here in Southwestern New Mexico,
was established at Aldo Leopold's urging in 1924.
His genius drove him to keep precise field records
to study the relationships over time
of what we now call the ecosystem.
As a result, he began to see that nature could no longer
be viewed as a static collection of species,
but is itself a kind of living organism.
[discussing sand]
And thus was born the subject of field ecology.
Although he published numerous technical articles,
it was his philosophical and poetic writings
contained in A Sand County Almanac
which had that magical quality of all great literature.
Dr. René Dubos explains.
[speaks with a French accent] - On the whole, people who talk about the environment
talk about it in this sort of vague, abstract, general way.
Whereas,
NSand County Almanactalks about the particular place.
A direct, visual, sensual experience.
And, in my opinion, this what has made the book so effective
that instead of discussing environmental problems
in the abstract, one relates the problem
to a very special situation,
that one can grasp with one's senses.
The environment is not something out there.
It's something in which you are, in which you function.
- Lorne Greene: It all began right here in Burlington, Iowa.
In this house on January 11th, 1887.
Aldo Leopold was born to Carl Leopold,
an emigrated German aristocrat.
And to Clara Starker Leopold,
daughter of a civic and financial leader of Burlington.
Aldo grew up atop what is called Prospect Hill.
Below was the Mississippi River.
Still one of the wildest areas
in the continental United States,
what better place could there have been
for a prospective naturalist to grow up?
It was here that the groundwork was laid
for his love affair with ornithology.
Here that he began his lifelong habit
of taking precise field notes.
And here that he bent for natural history
first expressed itself.
At Yale, these predispositions would be solidified
into a career choice.
Leopold was drawn into the newly emerging field of forestry.
Leopold biographer Susan Flader reflects
on the Leopold of those early days.
- Dr. Susan Flader: His friends often referred to his German soul,
meaning his tendency to think deep thoughts
about his experiences in the wild.
While in forest school,
he became tremendously imbued
with timber mechanics, logging,
surveying,
and other more technical aspects
of forestry.
So much so that he neglected at times
his long tramps of earlier years.
But he was very much
enthralled by the prospect of a career
in the newly created Forest Service.
- Lorne Greene: In 1909, Leopold obtained
his forestry degree from Yale.
Not surprisingly, his first job
was with the US Forestry Service.
And it took him to the Southwestern United States,
to Arizona and New Mexico.
And it was here that many of the land ethic principles
of his later years
evolved.
When Leopold arrived,
the Southwest was still pioneer country.
He had caught up with the frontier.
[harsh wind blowing]
But the Southwest was also a delicately balanced
and fragile ecosystem.
One susceptible to sudden and dramatic changes.
To a keen observer like Leopold,
the sudden changes were eye-opening.
He was forced to grapple for the first time
with a question of man and his progress.
And its effect on environmental quality.
It started with an attempt
to preserve big game hunting in the area.
This led him to the unmistakable recognition
of the human element in the ecosystem.
And the understanding that little could be done without
good public policy and private obligation for the land.
But perhaps most importantly,
it led him to the concept of the healthy land organism.
And this meant including in the ecosystem
predators such as the mountain lions, hawks, and wolves
that he once tried to eradicate.
[wolves howling]
He recalled reaching a dying wolf that he had just shot.
I was young then and full of trigger itch.
I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer,
that no wolves would mean hunter's paradise.
But after seeing
the green fire in her eyes die,
I sensed that neither the wolf
nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
[wolves whimpering and howling]
[loud diesel engine chugging]
Sometime during his New Mexico days,
he became one of the minority
who saw a diminishing return in a civilization
that uses a drained wetland as a symbol of progress.
Again, Susan Flader.
- When Leopold wrote Thinking Like a Mountain
near the end of his career,
he was telescoping into one dramatic instant
early in his career.
A process of thought that had actually required decades.
During the first 10 or 15 years
after he moved to Wisconsin,
he began to rethink what had been happening
in the Southwest and what was continuing to happen.
And it wasn't really until the mid- to late- '30s
that Leopold began to come up
with the notion of land health.
The notion of internal self-adjustment
in the biotic community that was to become
his hallmark of later years.
- Lorne Greene: In 1924, the same year that
the Gila Wilderness Area was set aside,
Leopold accepted a position in Madison, Wisconsin,
as Associate Director of the Forest Products Laboratory.
The research arm of the Forestry Service.
He was 41.
After four rather frustrating years,
he set off on his own, privately pursuing the field
that he had created, game management.
In 1939, he became a one-man department
of wildlife management at the University of Wisconsin.
Joe Hickey recalls the Leopold
of those early university days.
- Professor Leopold was one of the great teachers
that we had as this institution.
He had a love for young people
and particularly a fascination with the new and young ideas.
Suppose the thing I need to bring out
is that he was a man with a youthful mind.
Still in his sixties and just bubbling over
with enthusiasm about the natural world.
And he was a very humble man
who never thought of himself as a prophet
or a seer or somebody who was going to write
these indelible words bringing out the land ethic.
- Lorne Greene: In his relatively short stint
at the university,
Leopold had an extraordinary influence over his students.
And two of his most successful students
are Frederick and Frances Hamerstrom.
- Frances: Too many teachers are pretentious.
And they always seem to be wanting to put you down.
And I never knew Leopold to put anyone down.
- Frederick: Not anyone.
- He meant so much to us in a personal way that
it took us years to actually believe that he was dead.
We still are guided by
many of his principles.
If we have some writing to do or have to give a lecture
we'll sometimes think
how he lectured or read some of his writings.
- He was like a father in the very best sense of the word.
Someone you could go to, look up to,
talk with, be guided by.
And at the same time, without any feeling
that he was trying to
force you into something,
push you into something.
- And he made us all do certain things
that you wouldn't think
wildlife biologists would have to do.
- That's correct.
- There wasn't any TV in those days.
But we all had to write popular articles.
We all had to talk on the radio.
We all had to give lectures.
He wanted us to be effective people,
as well as just knowing our field.
- Lorne Greene: A peculiar irony for Leopold
was the deer question, which was to plague
his entire professional life.
The evolution of his thoughts about the environment
could be traced by his stands on what
to do about the size of deer herds.
From his New Mexico attempts to remove deer predators,
to his last political battle for a doe season in Wisconsin.
It represented a change from the notion
that more deer is always better
to a balanced and healthy ecosystem concept.
However, the battle for a doe season left him standing alone.
An object of ridicule,
right up to the time of his death in 1948.
Such is often the way of people
who are ahead of their times.
- Leopold had to
answer conservationists who felt that
he was simply a killer
in advocating that we take down the deer herd
and try to reduce the pressure on the land
so that we would have a forestry program
and not a ecological slum.
Which our deer herd was beginning to produce
in some parts of the state.
- Lorne Greene: But Leopold had a diversion.
A place where his thoughts could come together
in intellectual maturity.
In 1936 he purchased a burnt out farm
in the Central Sand Counties of Wisconsin.
By economic standards,
it was the poorest region of the state.
And yet it had a special quality
that Leopold was to discover
as he brought his piece of land back to health.
He wrote, On this sand farm in Wisconsin,
first worn out and then abandoned
by our bigger and better society,
we try to rebuild with shovel and ax,
but we are losing elsewhere.
It is here that we seek and still find our meat from God.
The passage is from the book calledA Sand County Almanac.
It's a book that can change the life of its reader.
The first part consists of 12 shack sketches
that are the wanderings of observations,
seasonally arranged,
which emanated from the refurbished chicken coop
that the Leopold family called "he shack."
These sketches are a testimony to the value
and the meaning of living in harmony with the land.
The shack sketches began in the dead of a Wisconsin winter.
This is most appropriate.
Since not only does January mark the new year for us,
it also signals the reawakening
of nature's odyssey of yearly events.
The squirrels know it as they mate
so that there may be more of their kind.
So, too, the cardinal knows it
on that January morning when he lets loose
with his first song.
Among the group of the year's first events,
Leopold had his favorites.
[Jim reads "January Thaw"] - Each year after the mid-winter blizzards,
there comes a night of thaw
when the tinkle of dripping water is heard in the land.
It brings strange stirrings.
Not only to creatures in bed for the night.
But to some who have been asleep for the winter.
The hibernating skunk curled up in his deep den.
Uncurls himself and ventures forward
to prowl of the wet world,
dragging his belly in the snow.
The track is likely to display an indifference
to mundane affairs uncommon in other seasons.
It leads across country as if its maker
had hitched his wagon to a star and dropped the reins.
And I follow.
The months of the year from January up to June
are a geometric progression
in the abundance of distractions.
In January, one may follow a skunk track.
Or search for bands on the chickadees.
With only an occasion of
a mild digression into other things.
- Lorne Greene: The January thaw is only a temporary respite
from winter's grip.
And like an eraser, a new snow will soon remove
all signs of yesterday's stirrings.
[wind howling]
[Jim reads from A Plea for Wilderness Hunting Grounds]
- January observation can be almost as simple and peaceful as snow.
And almost as continuous as cold.
There is time not only to see who has done what.
But to speculate why.
[reading "Good Oak"] There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm.
One is the danger of supposing
that breakfast comes from a grocery.
And the other that heat comes from the furnace.
- Lorne Greene: It is in dispelling the illusion of the second
supposing that heat comes from the furnace
that Leopold writes what, for many,
is the most memorable part of the shack sketches:
the cutting of the good oak.
[chopping into wood]
[Jim reading Good Oak] - If one has cut, split,
hauled and piled his own good oak,
and let his mind work the while,
he'll remember much about where the heat comes from.
[mallet pounding wedge in]
My dog does not care where heat comes from
but he cares ardently that it come and soon.
Indeed, he considers my ability to make it
something magical.
Such faith, I suppose, is the kind that moves mountains.
[fire crackles]
- Lorne Greene: It all started with a 60 year old oak.
Which two summers before had been struck by lightning,
leaving its typical spiral scar.
Now seasoned, on a crisp February day
they began to bring down their good oak.
[sawing back and forth by hand]
- Jim Fleming: We sensed that our saw was biting its way,
stroke by stroke, decade by decade,
into the chronology of a lifetime,
written in concentric [annual] rings of good oak.
It took only a dozen pulls of the saw
to transect the few years of our ownership
during which we'd learned to love and cherish this farm.
Abruptly we began to cut the years of our predecessor,
the bootlegger, who hated this farm.
Now our saw bites into the 1920's
the Babbittian decade when everything grew bigger and better
in heedlessness and arrogance-- until 1929,
when stock markets crumpled.
If the oak heard them fall,
its wood gives no sigh.
Now the saw bites into the teens,
the decade of the drainage dream,
when steam shovels sucked dry
the marshes of central Wisconsin
to make farms, and made ash-heaps instead.
We cut 1906, when the first state forester took office
and fires burned 17,000 acres in these sand counties.
We cut 1899, when the last passenger pigeon collided
with the charge of shot near Babcock,
two counties to the north.
It was in 1890 that the largest pine rafts in history
slipped down the Wisconsin River
in full view of my oak.
Now our saw bites the 1870's.
On 10 September 1877,
two brothers shooting Muskego Lake
bagged 210 blue-winged teal in one day.
And in 1875, ten hunters killed
153 prairie chickens at York Prairie.
The saw now severs 1865, the pith-year of our oak.
In that year John Muir offered to buy from his brother
the home farm thirty miles east of my oak.
We have cut the core.
At last there is a tremor in the great trunk;
All hands cry Timber!
It's not until the transect is completed
that the tree falls,
and the stump yields a collective view of a century.
By its fall the tree attests the unity
of the hodge-podge called history.
[birds cawing and quacking]
[Lorne Green:The Geese Return] - The sand counties begin March
still in winter's grip.
But the wintering mallards along the river
have only a short wait
for the sudden explosion of activity
that is about to occur.
Then it comes.
The snow melts.
The ponds, rivers, and lakes open up.
And in come spring's shock troops.
The cranes, ducks, and swans return.
[ducks quacking]
[geese honking]
And of course, the regal Canada geese return too.
[orchestral music]
[geese honking]
[The Geese Return Jim Fleming] - I once knew an educated lady,
banded by Phi Beta Kappa,
who told that she'd never heard or seen the geese,
that twice a year proclaim the revolving seasons
to her well-insulated roof.
Is education possibly a process of trading awareness
for things of lesser worth?
The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.
[geese honking vigorously]
The March morning is only as drab
as he who walks in it without a glance skyward,
ear cocked for geese.
They wind the oxbows of the river,
cutting low over the now gunless points and islands,
and gabbling to each sandbar
as to a long-lost friend.
They weave low over the marshes and meadows,
greeting each newly melted puddle and pool.
Finally, after a fewpro-forma circlings of our marsh,
they set wing and glide silently to the pond,
black landing-gear lowered
and rumps white against the far hill.
Once touching water,
our newly arrived guests set up a honking and splashing
that shakes the last thought of winter
out of the brittle cattails.
Our geese are home again!
[geese honk heartily, frogs calling]
- Lorne Greene: In April, after seven long months
of a kind of dormancy,
things begin to grow again in the sand counties.
[orchestral music]
Of these early happenings,
the blooming of the Draba, the smallest flower,
has for most people gone unnoticed.
- Jim Fleming: He who hopes for spring with upturned eye
never sees so small a thing as Draba.
He who despairs of spring with downcast eyes
steps on it unknowing.
He who searches for spring with his knees
in the mud finds it in abundance.
Draba plucks no heartstrings.
Its perfume, if there is any,
is lost in the gusty winds.
Its color is plain white.
Wears a sensible wooly coat.
Nothing eats it; it's too small.
After all, it is no spring flower,
but only a postscript to a hope.
[Bur Oak reader Lorne Greene] - April in the Sand Counties
once had a very different look to it.
It was the time of the Great Prairie Fires.
Then the bur oak stood like a lonely sentry,
overlooking the vast grasslands.
- Jim Fleming: bur oak is the only tree
that can stand up to a prairie fire and live.
Have you ever wondered why a thick crust
of corky bark covers the whole tree,
even at the smallest twigs?
Its cork is armor.
Bur oaks were the shock troops sent by the invading forest
to storm the prairie;
fire is what they had to fight.
Each April, before the new grasses
had covered the prairie with unburnable greenery,
fires ran at will over the land,
sparing only such old oaks as had grown bark
too thick to scorch.
- Lorne Greene: But in the 1840s,
the fires stopped and the region took on a new look.
All of the fires had taken care of grew up.
- Jim Fleming: Seedling oaks forthwith
romped over the grasslands in legions.
And what had been the prairie region
became a region of woodlot farms.
All the bur oaks except the oldest veterans
date back to the 1850s and the 1860s,
and this was when fires ceased on the prairie.
Thus, he who owns a veteran bur oak
owns more than a tree.
He owns a historical library
and reserved seat in the theater of evolution.
- Lorne Greene: By May, the March blooming maples
have converted the first flowers of the year
into green and red whirligigs.
And all over the sand counties,
the parade of blooms has moved into high gear.
Trillions in wooded areas.
Jacob's Ladder and wild plums along the edges burst forth.
[quartet music]
Lupines, cocoons, and wild indigo
in the open sandy prairies set their plumes.
And the ubiquitous red oak undergo
their special metamorphosis.
As far as the plants are concerned,
the transformation is completed in May.
It's spring.
It's also the time that many birds begin their nesting.
Including Leopold's beloved ruffed grouse.
[forest booming]
The last thrust of migrating birds passes through in May.
And the Savannah sparrows and bobolinks
are joined by the upland pluther in their pseudo prairies.
- Jim Fleming: When dandelions have set the mark of May
on Wisconsin pastures,
it's time to listen for the final proof of spring.
Sit down on the tusset, cock your eyes at the sky,
dial out the bedlam of meadowlarks and redwings.
And soon you may hear it.
The flight song of the upland cluck.
Just now back from the Argentine.
Just watch.
Soon a flash of silver will tell you
that a pluther is alighted and full at his long wings.
Whoever invented the word grace must've seen
the wing folding of the pluther.
His whole being says it's your next move
to absent yourself from his domain.
The county records may allege that you own this pasture.
But the pluther airily rules out such trivial legalities.
He has just flown 4,000 miles
to reassert the title he got from the Indians.
And until the young pluthers are awing,
this pasture is his.
And none may trespass without his protest.
The upland pluther fits easily
into the agricultural countryside.
He follows the black and white buffalo
which now pasture his prairies.
And finds them an acceptable substitute for brines.
There was a time in the early 1900s
when Wisconsin farms nearly lost
their immemorial time piece.
Universal gun powder plus the lure of pluther on toast
for post-Victorian banquets had taken too great a toll.
A belated protection of the federal migratory bird laws
came just in time.
- Lorne Greene: Hot, humid, and green.
Sometime in early June,
all thoughts of cool breezes
are gone for the next four months.
Hidden in the succulent greenery,
are hungry mouths eager to be fed.
Such as these redwing chicks that lie
upside down in their nest.
What they wait for are insects.
In June, there is an explosion of insects.
It's a world of visual beauty.
[relaxing music]
When the great hatches of insects occur,
every fisherman knows that it's time
to head for his favorite trout stream.
On those torrid June days
when waders feel like hot tar paper,
there's a refreshing of the soul for those
who fish Leopold's idyllic Alder fork
- Jim Fleming: This we now remember was a stream of parts.
High up near the headwaters would once seen a fork
narrow deep and fed by cold springs
that gurgled out under its close hemmed walls of alder.
What would a self-respecting trout do in such weather?
Just what we did.
Go up.
A trout is rising just upstream.
I paid some blind wishing it would always
stay thus soft and dry.
And measuring the distance with a false cast or two
laid down are spent in that exactly a foot
above his last swirl.
Forgotten now are the hot miles, the mosquitoes.
How like fish we are.
Ready nay eager to seize upon whatever new things.
Some wind of circumstance shakes down the river of time.
And now we rue our haste finding the gilded morsel
to contain a hook.
Even so I think there's some virtue in eagerness.
Whether it's object proof true or false.
Outwardly dull would be a holy prudent man
or trout or world.
Did I say a while ago that I waited for prudence sake?
That was not so.
The only prudence in fishermen is that designed
to set the stage for taking yet another
and perhaps a longer chance.
- Lorne Greene: As for the fish that are caught
on the Alder Fork.
- Jim Fleming: I shall now confess to you
that none of those three trout had to
be beheaded to fold a double to fit their casket.
What was big was not the trout.
But the chance.
What was full was not my creed, my memory.
128 acres according to the county clerk
is the extent of my worldly domain.
The county clerk is a sleepy fellow
who never looks at his record books before nine o'clock.
What they would show at daybreak
is the question here at issue.
Books or no books it is a fact
that at daybreak, I am the sole owner
of all the acres I can walk over.
It is not only boundaries that disappear
but also of the thought of being bounded.
Expenses unknown to deed or map are known to every gone.
And solitude supposed no longer
to exist in my county extends on every hand
as far as the dew can reach.
I can feel the sun now.
The bird chorus has run out of breath.
A tractor roars warning that my neighbor is astir.
The world has shrunk to those
mean dimensions known to county clerks.
We turn toward home and breakfast.
- Lorne Greene: At one time much of the Sand Counties
was covered by prairie.
And July was a spectacular time for an observer
of those burgeoned prairies as they'd burst into bloom.
Because most of the prairie had disappeared,
every remaining acre is like a torn page
from a great history book.
- Jim Fleming: The outstanding conservator,
the prairie flora ironically enough,
knows little and cares less about such frivolities.
It is the railroad with its fence right away.
- Lorne Greene: Leopold was particularly fond
of the compass plant.
Wherever one could be found on one
of those remaining railroad prairie relics.
For an individual plant may be over 100 years old.
- Jim Fleming: Heretofore unreachable by scythe or mower,
this relic of original Wisconsin gives birth
each July to a man high stalk of compass plant.
Or cutleaf Silphium, spangled with saucer-sized
yellow blooms resembling sunflowers.
What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like
when they tickle the bellies of the buffalo?
It's a question never again to be answered.
And perhaps not even asked.
Few grieved when the last buffalo left Wisconsin.
And few will grieve when the last Silphium follows
him to the lush prairies of the never never land.
- Lorne Greene: Cutting through the heart of the Sand Counties,
is one of the great rivers of the world.
The Wisconsin River.
Leopold knew the shifting subtleties
of this great river well.
For his Sand County farm rests on its banks.
A great river is an ecosystem unto itself.
And at no time is this more apparent
on the Wisconsin River than in August.
This is when the river shrinks into its main channel
creating beautiful pools, slews, and sandbars.
The previously barren floodplains springs to life.
Equaled only by the desert bloom after a rain.
Each year, there's a new creation.
Leopold likened it to a masterpiece painting.
- Jim Fleming: It is the river who wields the brush.
And it is the same river who before I can bring my friends
to view his work erases it forever from human view.
After that it exists only my mind's eye.
Like other artists my river is temperamental.
There is no predicting when the mood to paint
will come upon him or how long it will last.
But in midsummer, when the great white fleets cruise
the sky for day after flawless day,
it is worth the strolling down to the sandbars
just to see whether he's been at work.
The work begins with a broad ribbon of silt.
Brushed thinly on the sand in the receding shore.
When I see the silk ribbon turning green with
Eleocharis, I watch closely thereafter.
For this is the sign the river is in a painting mood.
At this stage the seedlings of plants too numerous
to count and too young to recognize spring to life
from the damp warm sand under the green ribbon.
Here and there a cardinal flower thrusts spear skyward.
At the head of the bar,
purple ironweeds and pale pink Joe-Pyes stand tall
against a wall of willows.
And if you have come quietly and humbly,
as you should to any spot that can be beautiful only once.
You may surprise a fox red deer standing knee high
in the garden of his delight.
In your mind you may hang up your picture.
And hope that in some other summer
the mood to paint may come upon the river.
- Lorne Greene: Leopold writes of the worth
of a dozen risings in the dark.
In the hope of hearing the chorus of quail.
And being party to other elusive morning events.
- Lorne Greene: By September the day breaks
with little help from birds.
A song sparrow may give a single half-hearted song.
A woodcock may twitter overhead en route
to his daytime thicket.
A barred owl may terminate the night's argument
with one last wavering call.
Few other birds have anything to say or sing about.
[orchestral music]
In June it is completely predictable that robin
will give voice when the light intensity reaches
0.01 candle power and that the bedlam
of other singers will follow in predictable sequence.
In autumn on the other hand, the robin is silent,
and it is unpredictable whether
the covey-chorus will occur at all.
- Lorne Greene: But even without the success
of hearing the covey-chorus,
the early morning rising has its lasting rewards.
- Jim Fleming: Somehow the blue autumnal needles
on those pines became thenceforth bluer,
and the red carpet of dewberry under those pines
became even redder.
- Lorne Greene: October is a special month.
- Jim Fleming: I sometimes think
that the other months were constituted mainly as
a fitting interlude between Octobers.
And I suspect that dogs and perhaps grouse
share the same view.
- Lorne Greene: It is the month for hunting.
Hunting never had a more
eloquent defender than Aldo Leopold.
Not the crazy mechanized thing that it can become today
but that solitary experience that brings us face
to face with our pre-city heritage.
- Jim Fleming: Hunts differ in flavor.
But the reasons are subtle.
The sweetest hunts are stolen.
To steal a hunt, either go far into the wilderness
where no one has been.
Or else find some undiscovered place under everybody's nose.
- Lorne Greene: His favorite was grouse hunting
at Adams County when the tamaracks turned smoky gold.
Of course in the company of a dog
that knows what is grouse work better than you do.
- Jim Fleming: Few hunters know that grouse exist
in Adams County.
For when they drive through it they see only
a waste of jack pines and scrub oaks.
Here come October, I sit in the solitude
of my tamaracks and hear the hunter's cars roaring up
the highway hell bent for the crowded counties to the north.
One way to hunt partridge is to make a plan based on logic
and probabilities of the terrain to be hunted.
Another way is to wander quite aimlessly
from one red lantern to another.
This will likely take you where the birds actually are.
The lanterns are blackberry leaves.
Red in October sun.
[birds chirping]
- Lorne Greene: It's a good hunting dog that will lead
the way through the river of red.
- Jim Fleming: Along the little boggy streams
of these friendly wastes,
called poor by those whose own lights barely flicker,
the blackberries burn richly red on every sunny day
from first frost to the last day of the season.
Every woodcock and every partridge has
his private solarium under these briars.
Most hunters, not knowing this,
wear themselves out in the briarless scrub,
and returning home birdless,
leave the rest of us in peace.
By us I mean the birds, the stream,
the dog, and myself.
The October breeze brings my dog many scents
other than grouse, each of which may lead
to its own peculiar episode.
Almost anything may happen
between one red lantern and another.
- Lorne Greene: For the Sand Counties,
November is truly a month of transition.
Gone is the last vestige of summer.
The fall colored leaves have all settled to the ground
and the naked limbs await the first transforming snow.
In this stark scene,
the wind is the main actor.
- Jim Fleming: The wind that makes music in November corn
is in a hurry.
The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward
in half playful swirls,
and the wind hurries on.
In the marsh, long windy waves surge across
the grassy sloughs, beat against the far willows.
A tree strives to argue, bare limbs waving,
but there is no detaining the wind.
On the sandbar there is only wind
and the river is sliding seaward.
Every wisp of grass is drawing circles in the sand.
I wander over the bar to a driftwood log,
where I sit and listen to the universal roar.
The tinkle of wavelets on the shore.
The river is lifeless.
Not a duck, heron, marsh hawk
or gull has sought refuge from wind.
- Lorne Greene: November is also the time to survey
your land to see what has happened over the past year.
The naked trees of November have many stories to tell.
- Jim Fleming: Every farm woodland in addition
to yielding lumber, fuel and post,
should provide its owner a liberal education.
This crop of wisdom never fails.
But it's not always harvested.
These writings are a record of some of the many lessons
I have learned in my own woods.
- Lorne Greene: The year ends much as it began
on the windswept Sand Counties.
Snow covered and cold.
By the first week of December,
there is no longer any doubt that winter,
as Central Wisconsin knows it, has returned.
The smells so prevalent just a month ago
are frozen in the ground.
A bird calling, any sound of life,
is once again the exception to the numbing silence
of the winter sunset.
Far from the southwest.
- Lorne Greene: It is in mid-winter that I sometimes glean
from my pine something more important than woodlot
politics and the news of the wind and weather.
This is especially likely to happen
on some gloomy evening when the snow
has buried all irrelevant detail.
And the hush of elemental sadness lies heavy
upon every living thing.
Nevertheless, high pines each with his burden of snow
are standing ramrod straight, rank upon rank.
And in the dusk beyond I sense
the presence of hundreds more.
At such times I feel a curious transfusion of courage.
- Lorne Greene: In his essay on leisure,
Leopold quoted Ariosto.
How miserable are the idle hours of an ignorant man?
One of the ways Leopold filled his leisure time
was to band birds that gathered around
the old shack in winter.
- Jim Fleming: To band a bird is to hold a ticket
in a great lottery.
It is an exercise in objectivity to hold
a ticket on the banded sparrow that's falleth.
Or on the banded chickadee that may someday
re-enter your trap, and thus prove that he is still alive.
But to the old timer, the banding of new birds
becomes merely pleasant routine.
The real thrill lies in the recapture
of some bird banded long ago.
Some bird whose age, adventures,
and previous condition of appetite
are perhaps better known to you than to the bird himself.
- Lorne Greene: One such bird was a chickadee.
Simply called by his band.
65290.
It was a chickadee that by its fifth winter
was the sole survivor of his generation.
- Jim Fleming: I know so little about birds
that I can only speculate on why 65290
survived his fellows.
Was he more clever in dodging his enemies?
What enemies?
A chickadee is almost too small to have any.
It seems likely that weather is the only killer
so devoid of both humor
and dimension is to kill a chickadee.
I suspect that in a chickadee Sunday school
two mortal sins are taught.
Thou shalt not venture into windy places in winter.
And thou shalt not get wet before a blizzard.
- Lorne Greene: And so the learning and healing
of the land would go on for another year.
Unlike ancient prophets,
Aldo Leopold had no mountain to climb.
Instead he walked his Sand County farm.
He watched, he listened,
he wrote down what he discovered.
And he thought and analyzed until at last
he became environmentally educated.
He understood.
But what he saw was not always pleasant
As he wrote,
one of the penalties of an ecological education
is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
Leopold also understood that we could not
heal land by government proxy.
The changes that bring about land health
would have to come from within us.
It is all laid out in his famous essay
"A Land Ethic."
When God like Odysseus returned from the wars in Troy,
he hanged all on one rope
a dozen slave girls of his household,
whom he suspected of misbehavior during his absence.
This hanging involved no question or propriety.
The girls were property.
The disposal of property was them as now,
as matter of expediency, not of right and wrong.
During the 3000 years which have since elapsed,
ethical criteria have been extended
to many fields of conduct.
But there is, as yet, no land ethic
dealing with man's relation to land
and to the animals and plants which grow upon it.
Land, like Odysseus' slave girls, is still property.
The land relation is still strictly economic
entailing privileges but not obligations.
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise.
That the individual is a member of a community
of interdependent parts.
The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries
of the community to include soils,
waters, plants, and animals.
Or collectively the land.
This sounds simple.
Do we not already sing out love for
and obligation to the land of the free
and the home of the brave?
Yes but just what and whom do we love?
Certainly not the soil,
which are sending helter-skelter downriver.
Certainly not the waters which we assume
have no function except to turn turbines,
float barges, and carry off sewage.
Certainly not the plants or which
we exterminate whole communities without batting an eye.
Certainly not the animals
of which we've already extirpated many
of the largest and most beautiful species.
A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration
management and use of these resources.
But it does affirm their right to continue existence.
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 respect for his fellow members
and also respect for the community as such.
Oh, yes.
And how well have we heeded the words of Aldo Leopold?
Not well enough.
- David Brower.
- David Brower: The Land Ethic is a concept that still escapes
most people in this country.
I think that we need to hear Aldo Leopold
again and again.
We need a Sand County Almanac
and other excerpts of his writings
readily at hand brought to light repeatedly.
I don't think anyone is going to write better
what he's already said.
He had a basic humor in it
that will catch public attention.
We just have to get it out before them.
The Land Ethic is evolving.
It is recovering.
It has a long way to go and we better hurry.
[Produced for the Wisconsin ETV Network, 1980]
[full-throated wolves bark and howl persistently]
[Executive Producer Paul Norton]
[Aldo Leopold: A Prophet for All Seasons]
[Producer-Writer Ronald C. Meyer]
[Cinematographer Timothy Ellestad]
[Editing Ronald C. Meyer / Timothy Ellestad]
[Original Music Phil Corriveau]
[Production Assistance Tamara England, Mark Samels]
[Guests David Brower, president, Friends of the Earth, René Dubos, Susan L. Flader, University of Missouri,
Joseph J. Hickey, Emeritus Professor of Wildlife Ecology University of Wisconsin]
[Narrator Lorne Greene]
[Voice of Aldo Leopold Jim Fleming]
[Special Thanks to: Nina and Charles Bradley,
Frank Terbilcox, Robert A. McCabe,
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources,
State Historical Society of Wisconsin,
Department of Iconography]
[a Metabasis production]
♪ [Paul Alan Levi's Moog synthesizer score] ♪
[telephone company message tones descend scale rapidly]
[five warm brass notes]