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THOMAS DEAN the prairie on the Leopold shack grounds and debarking some trees. The Leopolds planted about 30,000 trees on the land, and the Leopold Foundation—which now owns the land and has built the Leopold Center (much of which was constructed from “Leopold trees”) down the road a mile or so—is selectively culling these now-mature trees due to overcrowding. The garage at the Center needed some new ceiling log trusses, so our job was to debark some of the red pines for that purpose. After some hand-tool peeling of half of a twenty-foot log, my shift was done. But before I wandered off to pull goldenrod from the Leopold prairie, I collected several of my bark shavings and tucked them away to take home. Great, just what I need—more old pieces of wood to add to my odd collection of mementos. Except for books, I’m not that much of a pack-
Objects of My Admiration rat. I don’t save napkins from weddings or collect spoons emblazoned with pictures of cities I’ve visited. But now and then, I connect with some objects that resonate with significance to me, and I squirrel them away for my collection of Tom’s Important Oddities and Objects of Admiration. Among my most prized possessions is an old wooden roof shingle from Sigurd Olson’s Listening Point cabin near Ely, Minnesota. Sigurd Olson is another of my naturalist/con-
"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."
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went to Wisconsin, and all I brought back were a bunch of bark shavings from a red pine tree. This fall, I attended a “Land Ethic Leader” workshop at the Aldo Leopold Center near Baraboo, Wisconsin. If you don’t know, Aldo Leopold—born and raised in Burlington, Iowa—is arguably the twentieth century’s greatest conservationist. He authored the classic A Sand County Almanac, the book that introduced the most fundamental principle of ecology and environmentalism, the land ethic. In Leopold’s own words, “All ethics evolved so far rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to
4 Nov. 7-21 2012 | Little Village
—Aldo Leopold
include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. . . . 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.” Leopold also virtually invented ecological restoration, masterminding the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum, the first and still largest restored ecosystem in the United States. The second-oldest ecological restoration is on the old farm on which Leopold’s shack (an old chicken coop) sits—the place where he and his family spent nearly fifteen years in the 1930s and 1940s planting native prairie and woodland plants. That’s where my bark shavings came from. As part of our workshop, we engaged in a work project—pulling invasive goldenrod from
versationist heroes. He is of about the same generation as Aldo Leopold and was one of the guiding lights in establishing what is now the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness as well as such other prominent wilderness areas as Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He also served as president of the Wilderness Society and helped draft the Wilderness Act of 1964. Olson owned a cabin on Burntside Lake near Ely that was his local refuge. He named the land it stood on Listening Point, which became the subject of one of his several beautifully written books about the wilderness. The land and cabin are now owned by the Listening Point Foundation, and when I visited there several years ago, Chuck Wick (the vice president of the LPF) asked if I would like to take one of the original roof shingles home