by Paul McGuire
November 3, 2007
“The wild things that live on my farm are reluctant to tell me, in so many words, how much of my township is included within their daily or nightly beat. I am curious about this, for it gives me the ratio between the size of their universe and the size of mine, and it conveniently begs the much more important question, who is the more thoroughly acquainted with the world in which he lives?”
With these words, published in 1949 in A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold began his December entry, entitled “Home Range.” By that time, Leopold, having logged four decades of field, laboratory and classroom experience, was widely regarded by fellow biologists as a pioneer in the budding field of ecology, an old idea buttressed by modern science. His recognition of what he referred to as the “biotic community” had become the prevalent theme in his essays and reports offered to the students, peers and government agencies he served. With A Sand County Almanac, he took the concept to the general public.
It was not received with acclaim. Post-war Americans were hell-bent on retrieving prosperity denied by The Great Depression, followed by four years of sacrifice in World War Two. If discussed at all, the term community applied to humans and little else. Beyond people, other members of Leopold’s biotic community were usually referred to as resources, things to be consumed one way or other. To ease that consumption along, applied science was ready and willing to be the handmaiden, guaranteeing to one and all - “better living through chemistry.”
So, for all but ecologists and wilderness advocates, organic gardeners and naturalists, Leopold’s community was ignored - that is, until the downside of the new prosperity was exposed to a wide audience by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring.
We know the rest of the story. A Sand County Almanac joined Carson’s book on the required reading lists. We read them, read about them, listened to speeches about them, stuffed them in our backpacks. We read them still, along with Wallace Stegner, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Edward Abbey and a host of others - which leads us back to “Home Range”.
On our home range, November brings a hankering for a dose of Leopold, so out comes the “Almanac” for another round, along with The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays. Why it happens in November we are not sure, but the urge might be provoked by the first bare landscape since April, the first chance in a while to get a close look at what has happened during the year’s months of growth and heavy cover. Using Leopold’s example from the observations made on his land, we can take stock of our own small piece and determine what might be done to improve the little universes of our fellow residents through culling or planting or simply letting things change on their own. For here in the woods, nothing is more evident than the constancy of change and resistance than trenches cut a century ago by cows plodding to the barnyard ,or stonewalls pushed aside by generations of doomed elms. In the midst of it all stands our favorite example: a gnarly old pasture apple - a wizened yet fruiting survivor and home to many – a village elder surrounded by young ash, maple and cherry locked in a headlong race to the sun.
This taking stock extends from the nest to other pieces of the home range we have had a hand in caring for by one way or another. In this, we have joined with others, mainly through local land trusts who are the real foot soldiers in any campaign to save for future generations many of those places which have helped define us. Here in Western Maine, such local efforts to care for the home range have saved islands in the Androscoggin, the west shores of Mooselookmeguntic and Cupsuptic lakes, Bald Mountain in Oquossoc, Rumford Whitecap and headwater wetlands of Wilson Lake, to name a few.
All such places are more than scenes that satisfy our aesthetic senses or sustain our memories, important though they may be to us; they are the home range of who knows how many fellow creatures. In some cases, they may be significant - perhaps vital - in the continuity of their species. As members of Western Maine Audubon we owe it to them and to ourselves to become participants in local land trusts through action, funding, or both.
Beyond all of this, and here Leopold would agree, protecting a special place creates a classroom for learning the obligations of citizenship in the biotic community, obligations which extend from there to every farm, forest, lake, stream, camp lot and corner lot. After all, it is all “home range.”