"To protect your rivers, Protect your mountains." - Emporer Yu of China, 1600 BC
HENRY BESTON
The following short passage from Henry Beston's "The Outermost House", originally published in 1928, struck me on its first reading as summarizing my own feelings about wildlife. Henry Beston, known more as a lyricist nature writer or word crafter than as a true naturalist, laboriously chose just the exact words to express his perceptive views in "The Outermost House". After a less than enthusiastic reception, the book underwent reprinting numerous times and became recognized as a classic of American nature writing.
"We need another and a wiser, and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals... We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not underlings; they are not brethren; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."
ALDO LEOPOLD
My purchase of First Mountain, and the reasons for that purchase, mirror the actions and philosophy of Aldo Leopold when he bought a scrub sand farm in Wisconsin some 6o years earlier. Before my own birth, Leopold wrote the American nature classic "A Sand County Almanac", which detailed his work on his Wisconsin property and outlined his new land ethic. "A Sand County Almanac" reflects Leopold's development as America's first and pre-eminent conservationist, and was published the year after after his death in 1949, when I was two years old. I had not read Leopold's work prior to my own efforts to preserve the First Mountain property, and would not have been as receptive to his writing earlier. But, when I picked up "A Sand County Almanac" in 1996, Leopold's words immediately affected me as I recognized in his philosophy of a land ethic the same feelings and awareness that I had developed independently. The following passage comes at the end of the book under the section entitled 'Land Ethic' and summarizes Leopold's thoughts succinctly.
"It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value: I mean value in the philosophical sense."
"Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow."
"... The 'key-log' which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for a (land) ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."
DONALD CULROSS PEATTIE
The following quotes come from Peattie's 1948 guide " A Natural History of TREES of Eastern and Central North America". Born just over 100 years ago, Peattie died in 1964 before the modern age was upon us. This guide was one of three dozen books by Peattie, who has been described as one of the most widely read of all contemporary nature writers. Yet today, Peattie is much less read or known of than his contemporaries, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson.
His "Natural History of TREES is much more than a field guide, though it does include a key to tree species and full descriptive data. What makes Peattie's guide so much more than a simple field guide are his lengthy essays that capture more of the essence of the individual tree species, and includes a natural history of the specie's interaction with humans. Peattie is said to be anthropomorphic in his description of trees, but I believe that it would be more accurate to say that he uses descriptions that evoke human feelings that we can all easily comprehend, rather than in endowing human features to trees. I have chosen the quotes below, which describe the Eastern Hemlock, because the Hemlock forest is my favorite landscape in the northern forest and on First Mountain. Anyone with an interest in trees should be captivated by this book, which was reprinted in 1991.
"In the grand, high places of the southern mountains Hemlock soars above the rest of the forest, rising like a church spire - like numberless spires as far as the eye can see - through the blue haze that is the natural atmosphere of those ranges. Sometimes even its branches reach out like arms above the crowns of other trees. But though the Hemlock's top may rejoice in the boldest sun and brave any storm, the tree unfailingly has its roots down in deep, cool, perpetually moist earth. And no more light and heat than a glancing sunbeam ever penetrates through the somber shade of its boughs to the forest floor."
"Besides shade, the Hemlock loves rocks; it likes to straddle them with its ruddy roots, to crack them with its growing, to rub its knees against a great boulder." ...."It loves to lave its roots in white water - rushing streams and waterfalls; it despises slow water, warm and muddy, and so avoids the Mississippi valley and its works." ..."When the wind lifts up the Hemlock's voice, it is no roaring like the Pine's, no keening like the Spruce's. The Hemlock whistles softly to itself. It raises its long, limber boughs and lets them drop again with a sigh, not sorrowful, but letting fall tranquillity upon us."
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