The point, of course, is to see everything – what Virginia Woolf called “the thing itself.” Not just to open the pieces and find out how each one works but to understand their almonic unity – the sum that the molded gibs are played, “easier than its parts,” more simple than its parts, “be more beautiful than its symphony parts – one wing to pass.
A philosopher, a naturalist, and a pioneer in the field Lelold . A sandbox almanac: with sketches here and there (public library), published months after his death.
Leopold writes:
The song of the river in general refers to the interaction of the water in the rock, the roots, it is fast.
Rio Gavilan has such a song. It is sweet music, the riffles danced and the fat arrows were smeared under the mossy roots of sycamore, oak, and pine. It also helps, because the pores of the water therefore fill the small canyon alone with the turkey, they come down from the hills, but the song of the water is visible to all ears, except this one is heard by all. To hear even a few notes of it you must first continue here for a long time, and you must know the language of hills and rivers. Then at night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades rise above the rimrocks, sit still and listen to the wolf howl, and think with understanding of all that you have seen. Then you can hear it – a great harmony – Its score is written on a thousand hills, it marks the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms start over seconds and centuries.
Two generations after the German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the name the environmenttwo decades before Rachel Carson's America Marine Biologist made a household name for herself as she puts Robert Macfarlane, Loopold looks at his ruling torch, that fake lives the metabolism of the grace he faces a single living body:
Food is a continuation of Gavilan's song. I mean, of course, not only your food, but the food of the oak that fed the Cougar that died the ougar that died under the oak and went back to his edge. This is one of many cycles of food that starts from returning to the oak, because the oak also feeds the jay that feeds the goshawk that named your river, and the turkey that taught you your gravy, and the turkey that gives you the slip. And the common end of it all is to help the water of the cracked goavila separate one grain of soil from the broad hulk of the Sierra Madre to make another oak.
At the beginning of the century, where we stopped the progress of facts in more Discrete parts to be studied by Quantum Mechanics and Epigenetics, outside the neurosciete,
There are men charged with the task of examining the structure of plants, animals and soil which are the instruments of a great orchestra. These men are called professors. Each one chooses one instrument and spends his life holding it and explaining its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called research. A place without membership is called a university. A professor may make the strings of his own instrument, but never of another, and if he listens to music he must not allow the consent of his wife or his students. For they are all forbidden by the IronBound Taboo which shows that the making of tools is the domain of science, while the discovery of harmony is the domain of poets. Professionals who work in science and science achieve progress. Progress works so well that many of the most complex instruments are raised and broken in the rush to spread progress to all backward countries. So the parts are attacked by the song of songs. If the professor can separate each instrument before it breaks, he is well satisfied.
While his cartographer Carl Roger was interested in three elements of good health from a psychological perspective, Leopold looks at the crux of good life through a lens well defined as ecopsychology:
Science influences behavior and material blessings in the world. Its greatest contribution to morality is rationality, or scientific opinion. This means repeating everything except the facts; It means mediating the facts, let the chips fall where they may. One of the truths discovered by science is that every river needs more people, and all people need more innovation, so more science; Good health depends on the extension of this logic taxi. That the good health of any river may depend on the recognition of its music, and the preservation of a particular music, is a question which has not yet existed.
Science has not yet arrived at Gavilan, so the Otter plays tag in his pool and riffles and chases the oil rainbow under the flood where one day it will be driven to the Pacific, or in the sports hour you will argue for his title in the trout. As a scientist, there is no doubt about his design for life. He thinks that for him the Gavilan will sing forever.
A couple with Annie Dillard on what the weasel did that knows about the secret of life, then Walt Whitman on listening to the song of existence and Alexander von Humbuldt on the essence of science and how to read the poetry of nature.
