In high school, there would come a study hall when the itch of spring became so strong that I would stop reading, pull out three sheets of paper, and draw grids for calendars. It would be February, and the calendar months I drew were March, April, and May. I'd number each box and then take them home and wait...and watch...and listen. You see, what filled me with delight on those spring-time days were the returning birds. The first red-wing blackbirds that filled the icy swamp with conk-a-rees...the bold robin that might well be snowed-in soon after arriving...the song sparrow that heralded the end of sugaring...all were carefully noted on the day I first heard them.

My home was a farm in southwestern New Hampshire, with about 15 to 20 cows and lots of woods and fields. The first hermit thrush and veery that sang from the woods across the road were followed by whip-poor-wills that perched on the fence near the house and broke open the dark with their loud, repetitive calls. The music of the oriole brought me running outside to catch its gold shine in the trees at the bottom of the hill. Mornings I laid awake with the windows open. The swallows that perched on the electric wire, running from house to barn, talked away to each other, and the neighborly phoebe woke me up with its constant "fee-bee," if the swallows hadn't. The bobolinks bubbling in the hayfield just beyond the driveway always lifted my heart.

Occasionally I woke really early, and the bird music was incredible, just incredible, as I remember. I'd say that it was there, in that time, that I knew I loved the earth and its non-human species (except snakes-still have a hard time with them). Reading and reporting on Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in the latter part of high school deepened those feelings. (See Skyearth Letter, October 1997 issue of Seeker for a bit more about Carson and her successor in spirit, Sandra Steingraber).

My work history has been associated for the last 20 years with organizations that in one way or another echoed my love for land. It continues in my newest venue at The Wilderness Society (TWS). As part of the new employee packet, I was given a copy of Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac with Essays on Conservation from Round River (copyright in 1948 and 1953 respectively; the 1970 edition which I received is published by Ballantine Books). I had read it at least 25 years ago, and upon rereading, I found that the 50 years since its original publication have validated Leopold's concerns, and his observations about the human vs. nature scene still ring all too true.

To step back a moment to the birds of my young spring-times: Leopold comments:

When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living. This much is at least sure: my earliest impressions of wildlife and its pursuit retain a vivid sharpness of form, color, and atmosphere that half a century of professional wildlife experience has failed to obliterate or to improve upon.

I can't help but agree. The singular ovenbird trotting across the old road for the first and only time and the wood thrush singing from a branch in the sugarbush when I was 12 or 13 are images that I have not forgotten. Nor has the rose-breasted grosbeak in the beech beside the road that I walked to school slipped from memory.

Leopold further observes that:

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. By land is meant all of the things on, over, or in the earth. Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism....The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?' If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts?

In this world it is said that change is the only constancy. Wild places are epitomes of the constancy of change, even though a wilderness has the subtle effect of seeming changeless. If some place is wilderness, then it remains free of human habitation and human destruction. That is, I believe, our understanding, which is not to say that the winds and the waters, the lightning storms and the fires, the beetles and the fungi won't create change. Without the human elements, though, the inhabitants of wilderness are free - as free as they can be within the confines of finding food and shelter. Our entering into wilderness creates an eddy of human disturbance, particularly our entering into it in large numbers. Where is our freedom in doing so?

On a different slant, consider an aging, second-growth forest that is surrounded by roads patterned with houses. Would we think this comparative postage stamp of human-affected open space a returning wild land? If we connected this piece to another and another, we would have created a network, with corridors between parcels for safe crossings for wildlife. Is that enough? For many people, the experience of a 100 to 200-acre wild area may very well be their only "wild" time. If we desire to change the culture to one of a greater consciousness of our natural world, that is where it will take hold.

How else do we awaken, in those not committed and not touched by the land, the spirit that feels empathy for wild things...a true empathy that is based on a leave-alone ethic. How do we engender love for the wild places in the ones for whom the wildest place is an urban street corner or their sports-utility vehicle and mansion in suburbia. How do we revitalize that breath of desire for places that are empty of noise and engine fumes and full of wild spirit?

For some it comes from experiencing relatively undisturbed and beautiful mountains, the sweetness of a river slipping away, great forests sweeping across valleys and ridges. But for many it may be the urban gardens that teach the next generation where our sustenance begins. (See Skyearth Letter, June 1997 issue of Seeker in which I described H. Patricia Hynes, A Patch of Eden: America's Inner-City Gardeners.) It is by inculcating the love of green and growing things, that people grow into the belief that caring about the land beneath our feet and the feet of others and no one's feet is part of their breath, their spirit.

It is the generation from the 80s which I believe has missed out on the touch of the land. It is a generation of true rootlessness which has no sense of place because their focus is on the mall...on encapsulated spaces full of devices purposely meant to deprive them of any sense of being connected to the earth, of being grounded in the biota which once existed in the land now buried beneath those big box buildings and parking lots.

I recently spent a week in a retreat with the other conservation staff at The Wilderness Society's national office. TWS has worked for many years to have federally owned, qualified wilderness land further protected by the official wilderness designation, but what was being repeatedly spoken of at the retreat was the creation of a network of "wild lands" across the country.

I believe that connecting communities via their wild lands (whether these are currently wild or hold the capability of becoming wild again) will foster a change in culture. That change to finding one's soul in the world of nature instead of losing one's soul in the world of the marketplace of possessions is urgently needed. The children who experience these wild lands will remember them, will remember the birds and the animals, the crisp little brook wending its way through the alders, the granite outcrops, the green trees whose only business is to grow...and die...and provide homes and food for woodpeckers and insects. Memories such as these were Leopold's underpinnings. They are also mine.

It is truly unimportant whether or not the future remembers us as individuals. It is not important whether they even remember it was us who left a legacy of wild places. The only important thing is that there is wilderness of thousands, even millions, of acres that may never be traversed by humans and that there are small wild places that breathe a fresh spirit into the souls of people who live nearby. That means that we protect many, many places that can create the experience of wildness.

It also means that we stabilize population. If we keep growing in numbers, there will be no possibility of growing a culture that truly loves wild places. Although there has been a change in the winds of the spirit this past decade, unfortunately the growth in the world's population will blow right through it, unless the world can bring itself to zero population growth and to zero growth in economic indicators, sooner rather than later. We are, I believe, going to have to recognize that a steady state of external factors is the healthiest.

Quite simply, we don't need more people or more consumer goods. We do need more compassion and greater spirit and recognition of the sentience of all things existent in nature. We do need those places where solitude is plenty, the earth breathes freely, and the stars burst forth from the black bowl of the sky.

(Copyright by Cherie Staples - No reproduction without express permission from the author)

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