Arduously long post on my first (solo) field trip, Leopold, and narrative arguments.

Last Saturday, Sept 11, I went to El Malpais National Monument, notable for its thick layer of lava rock (el malpais means “the bad country” – very little grows on the rock-covered ground) and the large tunnels formed in the lava, which I got to explore with a biologist leading her freshman class on a field trip. As we toured the land and the tunnels, the biologist, Diana, asked the students to view what was before them through the lens of their next assignment – a story told from the point of view of a microbe living in the caves. This experience has me thinking about how story constructs our view of a place and why it’s so useful to enviromental writing in general.

Microbe, I learned, is another word for “microorganism.” Microbes are living things too small for the naked eye to see, a broad category including bacteria, fungi, and microscopic plants (like algae) and animals (like protists). In leading her class on this trip, Diana’s challenge was to help them understand the conditions in which microbes live and do their work, and to imagine these conditions and this work as part of an ecological system. The problem she needed her students to work through, then, was one of time and space.

The narrative mode of discourse is ideal for working through this kind of problem, and for this reason it is primary in environmental writing, which seeks to know and explain the specific workings of the natural world’s features and their relationships to one another, much in the way a novel is our primary way of working through the specific doings of an individual among other individuals, and their relationships with one another. Diana asked her students to pay attention to detail and to use these details in their narratives: in the seemingly desolate environment of the underground caves, what did the microbes eat? (soil, other microbes) how did this food reach them? (in water dripping into the cave and on wind blowing through it) how did plant microbes photosynthesize? (with the dim light filtering through tiny holes in the cave’s ceiling). What did they want? Who were their enemies? What happened to them when they died, and how did they die? By answering these questions, students began to construct their stories.

But why would constructing stories in which the protagonist is a microbe lead to a better understanding than simply answering a list of questions like the ones above? One reason is that to write in narrative form one must impose the passage of time and reflect on its consequences, a central concern to most environmental writing. Another reason is that narrative is fundamentally about relationships, as is ecology. By not only writing but thinking in the narrative mode, students were forced to consider microbes not in an isolated moment, nor in a space closed off from outside stimuli (a moment and space that don’t actually exist), but in the chaotic and ever-changing reality of their surroundings. It is also significant that implicit in this narrative assignment is the argument that understanding an object’s linear progression through time alongside its dependencies and connections with other objects and factors at any given moment is a crucial component of what science, as a way of thinking, and the natural world, as an object of study, have to offer us.

Throughout A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold shows that he understood, consciously or sub-consciously, that narrative is an essential rhetorical tool for conveying the importance of what he calls “wildness.” Throughout the book he attempts to answer the question, “What is valuable and why is it valuable?” I was particularly struck by the way he answers this question in the first chapter of the book’s second section, “Wisconsin,” and its first three sub-sections, “Marshland Elegy,” “The Sand Counties,” and “Odyssey.” In “Marshland Elegy” Leopold tracks the disappearance of a particular biotic community, the marshlands of Wisconsin, aiming to show his readers that such an event should be avoided, that marshlands should be preserved, and preserved properly. But why should they be preserved? Why are they valuable? To answer this implicit question, Leopold casts the crane as this section’s central character. Like any central character in a narrative argument, the crane must be likable and worth rooting for, and Leopold makes him so by first appealing to his age and durability, and to his intimate relationship with the surrounding land:

“A sense of time lies thick and heavy on [the crane marsh]. Yearly since the ice age it has awakened each spring to the clangor of cranes. [. . .] [O]ur appreciation of the crane grows with the slow unraveling of earthly history. His tribe, we now know, stems out of the remote Eocene. The other members of the fauna in which he originated are long since entombed within the hills. When we hear his call we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolutuon. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.” (96)

It seems, then, that the presence of cranes defines the place Leopold describes (he calls it “the crane marsh”), and that the place is valuable at least in part because they are there. This is in service of his larger argument – the answer to the above questions about value: “The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate” (101). But what if this argument isn’t good enough for some readers, who may not think that an animal’s long tenure in a place says anything about how that place or that animal should be treated, and who are not convinced that wildness is a virtue?

To strengthen his point Leopold again relies on narrative and characterization in the following section, “The Sand Counties.” Here there is a conflict of values: those of Leopold and other sand county farmers vs. those of “economists.” According to the latter, the sand counties are poor, but Leopold calls this assumption into question by judging the land according to different currencies and use values than those used by economists. His land hosts lupine, pasque-flowers, sandworts, linaria, cranes and woodcocks, and Leopold sketches each of these in a way that gives them a quiet dignity: “Pasques do not say much, but I infer that their preference harks back to the glacier that put the gravel there” (103). By his standards of measurement the sand counties are far from poor.

Finally, Leopold tells the stories of a two different atoms, one that travels through a healthy ecosystem and one that travels through a sick one, as a way of arguing for the value of wildness, in the section titled “Odyssey.” As time passes, Leopold’s central characters (the atoms) pass through and become a part of a great variety of their landscape’s features, giving Leopold the opportunity to catalogue the charateristics of each. This journey also allows Leopold to unify the features of each landscape, showing that the natural state of a place is the interdependence of its parts all working towards continuity (in the case of the pristine, healthy ecosystem) or towards collapse (in the case of the spoiled, unhealthy ecosystem). Leopold argues for the value of the land-left-alone by characterizing it as resourceful: when fire strips essential nitrogen from the soil, Baptistas (plants) harness nitrogen from the air and pump it into the ground, creating a habitable environment for more plants, and over time the soil is restored. But when humans interfere, imposing their own impatient clock, the central-character-atom is “imprisoned in oily sludge.”

This is long enough, but I’m still wondering lots of things. Since Leopold rails against those of us too concerned with the present and not concerned enough about the future, and Dillard stakes much of what she believes on The Present, what can we learn in the comparison? What do Leopold’s “heroes” (the protagonists of his stories) say about his own cultural values? Are his arguments ultimately persuasive, or does his anthropomorphism make them . . . I don’t know, soft?

AND I'm including a short video of my hike at El Malpais, which we left way back in paragraph 3. It's of the entrance to one of the lava tubes. I didn't know the iPod I was shooting with had audio or I would've narrated.