In his “Land Ethic” section of A Sand County Almanac, Leopold argues that extending the rights of life and autonomy to the biotic community is natural and right. Both of these aspects are contained in his idea of ethical evolution. Nature evolves; it can do nothing else. So does our ethical sense, because we are disposed to make more and more complex communities, so our sense of ourselves within those communities changes over time. “All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts” (203). His opening allusion to Odysseus’s slave girls first strikes us as horrible, evil, crude, but this reaction is part of his point. Of course we are appalled by the image of twelve women hung on a single rope. We don’t wait to hear what kind of women they were, we care only that they were human beings. But it wasn’t always so, and so must our view of biotic community change.
Arguing for mass ideological change is a complex task, and the Almanac is a complex text. Not complex like the EIS as read by Killingsworth and Palmer – Leopold writes direct, verb-style prose with strong and recognizable narratives – but complex in all it aims to do and how it goes about doing it. Reading Leopold alongside Beale gives me a way of explaining this (and of seeing it in the first place). When you hold Beale’s aims of discourse up to the Almanac, it seems Leopold is doing at least a little, and often quite a lot, in all four quadrants (scientific, poetic, instrumental and rhetorical discourse). Poetic discourse is imaginative, relative, experiental and embraces subjectivity. The Almanac has Leopold marvelling on nearly every page at some deep spiritual joy brought to him by a bird, a tree, a walk in the woods. Like poetic discourse, scientific discourse is contemplative, but it is also objective, classificatory and formalistic. We see this in Leopold’s cataloguing of species of trees, birds, flowers. Instrumental discourse serves the action it aims to create, which can manifest in many ways. For Leopold, it means embedding within the text a specific, if elusive, ethical prescription. Rhetorical discourse also aims for action, and is expressive and relative and objective, and the Almanac is rhetorical in the sense that Leopold creates and sustains a powerfully persuasive ethos. Stories packed with sensory detail and the interiority of the author make us care about him and his surroundings. The wry sense of humor and cutting irony also pull us onto his side, as does the obvious care he shows the biotic community, and the language he uses to describe it.
This blog post is too short to deal much more with these ideas – and frankly I’m not sure I’m up to the challenge anyway. But I will say that this book fascinates me in lots of ways, like the way it is stylistically direct and philosophically and rhetorically complex. And with the way it uses stories so often and so effectively as rhetorical devices. Why are stories so rhetorically effective here when they’d be less so in a different type of discourse? Why does environmental writing generally seem so reliant upon story as rhetoric? Is it because stories are how we describe the passage of time, perhaps THE key theme of environmental writing? Does it have something to do with Killingsworth and Palmer’s observations about narratives being especially communicative and democratic? I’m not sure, but I’d like to think more about it, and to use these texts in the process.
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