leopold land ethics

The Narrative Ethics of Leopold's Sand County AlmanacAuthor(s): James Jakób LiszkaSource: Ethics and the Environment, Vol. 8, No. 2, Special Issue on Environmental Narrative(Autumn 2003), pp. 42-70Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40339066 .

Accessed: 28/04/2014 09:43

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethics and theEnvironment.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 143.117.157.129 on Mon, 28 Apr 2014 09:43:28 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=iupress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40339066?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


THE NARRATIVE ETHICS OF LEOPOLD'S SAND COUNTY ALMANAC

JAMES JAKOB LISZKA

ABSTRACT:

Although philosophers often focus on the essays of Leopold's Sand County Almanac, especially "The Land Ethic," there is also a normative argument present in the stories that comprise most of the book. In fact the shack stories may be more persuasive, with a subtlety and complexity not available in his prose piece. This paper develops a narrative ethics methodology gleaned from rhetoric theory, and current interest in narrative ethics among literary theorists, in order to discern the normative under- pinnings of the stories in Part 1. The narrative ethics approach sidesteps the need to ground the land ethic in ethical theory - which has been a reconstructive and problematic task for the philosophical interpreters of Leopold - and suggests, instead, that it emerges in Leopold's very effort to narrate his, professional, personal, and practical experience with nature. The involves examining the stories in terms of their emotional, logical and performative aspects. The result is an analysis that shows not only how these stories express normative claims, but also justify them. One conclusion of the analyses is that, in the narratives, there is less emphasis on the problematic notion of an over-arching "community" than in the prose pieces, and more emphasis on the metaphor of other living things as "fellow travelers" in the "odyssey of evolution." Second, the

ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 8(2) 2003 ISSN: 1085-6633 ©Indiana University Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. Direct all correspondence to: Journals Manager, Indiana University Press, 601 N. Morton St., Bloomington. IN 47404 USA [email protected]



narratives take on an ironic attitude toward the ecological order, less discernable in the prose essays. The order itself may not be ethically admirable, but should be preserved since it makes possible any ethical relations within it. Thus, the narrative reading suggests some temperance to the usual holistic interpretation of his land ethic and its concomitant criticisms especially the charge of ecofacism. We should not take the land ethic imperative at its face value, in the sense that the good of the order itself is an intrinsic good. In the narratives, individuals are shown not merely to be means to the ecological whole, but the focus of sympathy and concern, in a manner that demands their good should also be an object of moral consideration.

My purpose here is to show how an environmental ethic emerges out of the more narrative elements of Leopold's classic work, A Sand County Almanac. This is despite Leopold's own concern that narratives might not provide sufficient means for making good ethical judgments: "It seems to me, therefore, that any artistic effort, whether a picture or an essay, most often contains less than is needed for an ethical judgment (letter to H. Hochbaum March 1, 1944; cited in Ribbens 1988, 95).

Leopold was happy to give just a simple prose expression of his land ethic, and seemed reluctantly dragged into the business of story telling by the interests of his Knopf editors in nature writing (Ribbens 1988, 92-93). The essence of the land ethic had been formulated by him as early as 1933 while Leopold worked as a consultant in the Southwest for the CCC (Meine 1987, 34). Yet, in many respects, I would argue that the shack stories - mostly made between the period of 1941 and his death - are ironically more persuasive, and yield a subtlety and complexity not available in his prose piece. In fact the 1947 revision of his land ethic essay may have made changes that diminished some of the credibility of his argument, and have led to some of its more severe criticisms.

The mantra has been that the three parts of A Sand County Almanac form a sort of hierarchy, in which the first part, composed primarily of narratively organized observations and empiricisms, supports the allegories, commentaries, and parables of the second part which, in turn, give credence to the prose and explicit statements of the third part (cf. Tallmadge 1987, 114ff). Although it's true that the final arrangement was in large part Leopold's own (except for decisions made by his son and editors after his death), we know that Leopold played with a number of organizations

JAMES JAKdB LISZKA THE NARRATIVE ETHICS OF LEOPOLD 43



of the material. Given that most of the pieces written in Part I were written last, it may also be possible to view them as stand alone pieces that reflect some of his latest thinking.

The "Land Ethic" essay is problematic from a philosophical point of view since, with the exception of a few references to some popular ethical traditions, it does not connect to any serious ethical theory. This suggests some of the reasons some philosophers have belittled its import, and dis- missed it as superficial philosophy. Even Callicott's admirable, classical essays (1979, 1987) on the conceptual foundations of Leopold's land ethic remain a reconstruction of how a philosopher might conceivably ground the claims made in Leopold's essay but, still, we're not sure that Leopold explicitly developed his thinking in that manner. In any case, that reconstruction shows Leopold's work to be a loosely connected set of threads, rather than a systematic argument.

The narrative approach dismisses the need to ground the land ethic in ethical theory, and instead suggests that it can be seen to emerge in Leopold's very effort to narrate his, professional, personal, and practical experience with nature. As Christopher Preston notes, "normativity, if it emerges at all [in the narrative] emerges out of the practices, traditions, and lives op- erating in the specific situations described in the narrative" (2001, 249).

The difficulty with using narrative methodology is that it is not settled. There are two problems that narrative ethics must address that especially apply in the case of Leopold: one is how it is exactly that narratives express norms and values and, secondly, how might narratives justify them, and so lend themselves to the kind of ethical judgments that Leopold thinks they are little capable of doing. Certainly, there is usefulness to a purely expressive use of narrative, and for some thinkers, such as Richard Rorty, description and re-description are all that narrative is capable of doing in any case (1991, 8-9). Narrative ethics approaches in medical ethics have proven useful in this regard (Burrell and Hauerwas 1997; Carson 1997; Chambers 1996, 1997; Charon 1997; Clouser 1996; Frank 1995; Hunter 1991; Lauritzen 1996; Montello 1997; Nelson 1997). The sort of thick descriptions that these yield help in understanding patients' positions in regard to medical decisions, and so enable better informed decision making and facilitated consensus. But, in that case, it is the extra-narrative norms that interlocutors bring to bear in the context of dialogue and con- versation that ultimately matter to the evaluation and justification of a decision, and not the narrative per se (cf. Arras 1997; Childress 1997).

44 ETHK^^^



If narrative is to perform more than an expressive function it must also devise the means by which it evaluates its moral claims. Otherwise we are reminded of Aesop's proverb that "one story is good til another is told." And although this is a quite satisfactory situation for Rorty, it dissatisfies a number of philosophers, and non-philosophers as well. This is certainly true in the case of environmental narratives, as Christopher Preston points out (2001, 29). In any case, narrative ethics must overcome the more critical problems with both functions. Of course we can't be expected to address all these problems in these few short pages. Suffice it to say, though, that Alasdair Maclntyre's approach (1981), although for- mative, is programmatic and vague, consequently, difficult to apply to particular narratives, and also lacks the means to evaluate competing narratives to the extent that it lacks the means to evaluate competing traditions. Thick description theory, such as Martha Nussbaum's (1990) or Peter Levine's (1998), is capable of addressing the narrative's expressive power, but does not have the wherewithal to evaluate competing narratives (although in the case of Nussbaum, she does not think that narratives can even serve that function in any case (1990, 27). The new casuistry, such as proposed by Albert Jonson and Stephen Toulmin (1988), provides very powerful models for both analysis and evaluation of particular narratives (understood as case studies), and works quite well in situations where there is general agreement about basic norms but, for that very reason, the theory as a whole is disposed to conventional solutions, as it was the case with its classical predecessor - the casuistry of the 16th century.

In addressing the problems with the expressive and evaluative features of narrative, I would propose that the first aspect can be addressed by attending to the very rich studies of our friends in literary theory. In terms of the problem of evaluation, it seems to me that the safest argument is to take the position of Wayne Booth (1963, 1988) that narratives do have an argumentative force, but that it is more rhetorical than logical. In this way, we can combat Rorty's weak account of narrative as mere description. By the rhetorical power of narrative I mean that its goal can be thought of as similar to the goal of persuasive speech - which, as Aristotle understood it, is calling on the audience to make a judgment about the direct and indirect claims made in the speech (Rhetoric 1377b). But, as classically understood in Aristotle, good rhetoric persuades at three levels: logos, ethos, and pathos. I will want to argue that, in the main, this account still holds good, and show how good narratives, such as Leopold's, persuade by simi-

"""""""^AMeTm^l/S^ THE

NA^ATIVE^rHICS

OF

LEOPOLD 45



lar means. In fact, it may reasonably be argued that a story is often more profoundly persuasive than argument alone, since it addresses the whole person, that is, in addition to logical proofs and explanations, it also provides what might be called character (correspondent to ethos) and emotional proofs, following the language of Aristotle in the Rhetoric (cf. 1356a). Of course, how a story does this is somewhat different than how a speech might, but that will be part of my task to demonstrate its plausibility.

This is not a far-fetched approach to Leopold's work. As his 1948 Foreword shows, each part of Sand County Almanac is aligned with these three rhetorical aspects. The last part, as he says, sets forth the conservation ethic in "logical form," (1989, viii) while the second part is a story of his own personal transformation to that ethic, and so is really a story about his ethos and character. Although not explicitly stated, it is clear that the first part emphasizes the pathetic and sentimental, as emphasized in the context of living with his own family, while living in the semi-wildlands of Sauk County. But I think the book should be looked at fractally: each part - although emphasizing one aspect of the rhetorical triad - reflects the whole as well.

HOW NARRATIVES EXPRESS NORMS

First, let me begin with a general account of how a narrative is normatively expressive. If we follow our friends in literary theory - especially those concerned with narrative ethics (Attridge 1999; Buell 1999; Cham- bers 1984; Eldridge 1989; Hinchman and Hinchman 1997; Maclean 1988; McCormick 1988; Miller 1986; Newton 1995, 1997; Parker 1994; Pratt 1977; Schwarz 1997; Siebers 1992) - a narrative analysis in this regard should consider three important aspects: the contents of a narrative, their textual organization, and the performative conditions under which the narrative is authored and read (cf. Chatman 1978; Iser 1978). The content of the story (fabula, histoire) is the stuff out of which a narrative is constructed. These include the story's characters, events and happenings (Chatman 1978, 19). The organization (discourse, sjuzet) is traditionally thought to include character development, setting, description, plot, point of view (or focalizatiori), and the story's thematic unity (Chatman 1978, 19). Basically, organization involves how the story is told, and who does the telling. These generate differences between the actual author, the person who has done the work and who will benefit from any royalties, the implied author, whose character, values and norms are inferred by the reader

46 ETHICS &

THE

e'tTvIRONMENt"

8(2)

2003



on the basis of the organization of the narrative, and the narrator(s), who is identified as the narrative's raconteur, among several other subtle dis- tinctions. The person of the narrator, for example, adds further nuance, as is clear in the differences between first or third person narration, and the differences between omniscient narrators and other types. The third, performative aspect of the story includes not only the roles and responsibilities of the author and teller of the tale, but the reader as well, and the normative interrelations among them. These, too, entail different sorts of readers, including the implied reader - the reader as constructed by the intent of the author - and the real, actual reader (cf. Booth 1988, 128, 457; Iser 1978, 34ff ).

Certainly these three aspects of the narrative can be analytically sepa- rated, but in practice they are fully integrated and interdependent in the story as a whole, and act to produce its total normative effect. Analyti- cally, we can find important normative centers in the narrative. One is its thematic unity, wherever it is present. Following the work of Hayden White and others, it can be argued that the thematic unity of a story is constituted by three supervening levels (White 1987, 1-25). Temporal contiguity is the sequencing of events in a story, and in and of itself reads as a chronicle might. Although it is necessary feature of any narrative, such contiguity is hardly sufficient to produce a true narrative. Examples include annals and chronicles, which are more a list of events than stories proper. The true beginnings of a story emerge when contiguous events are concatenated by causal or intentional connections, or other types of relationships. When this happens, the story becomes followable (cf. Ricouer 1984, 149-52; Gallie 1968). At this level of narrative, a competent audience is shown how one event may follow from another, and they begin to see a logic and coherence to events and happenings emerge. What followability creates is discovery. The events line up to reveal something, something new beyond the mere listing of the events in chronological order. For example, in a detective genre we may discover more and more about the circumstances of a murder; clues are found, motives disclosed, and suspicions are raised; in tragedies, concatenation shows a complica- tion, typically leading to the peripety or reversal of fortune.

Yet the mere concatenation of events may not be sufficient for a unified story. This is achieved when events cohere under an ending. The ending is understood not as the last event of the story but the raison d'etre of the story, thus making the story seem purposive rather than serial - that is,

~"^^ 47



teleologically coherent and not just concatentated. Based solely on concatenation, there is no reason for events to end, or, no sense of closure in a certain subset of events. It is White's argument - and mine as well - that this teleological coherence is achieved normatively, and typically identified as the thematic unity of the story (White 1987, 21ff). That which ultimately makes something into a story - understood as a series of events with an ending - is simultaneously what makes it normative. To take a simple example, for a story to express a thematic unity typical of a classic romance (such as a fairy tale in its simpler forms), it will employ certain overarching norms: that good prevails over evil; those who act on the side of good are rewarded, and those on the side of evil punished. These norms will direct certain outcomes: the agent identified as the hero will be successful, and the villain failed - although the reader, of course, will still view this as a tension, because as far as she is concerned, the opposite is still a possibility. Thus, when the virtuous hero combats the vicious villain, if it has the romantic theme, its outcome will be such that the hero prevails in the combat. There is a certain teleological logic at work here, such that at the thematic level we move beyond explanation of events to what such events might mean, normatively speaking.

But, in addition to the thematic unity of the story, we must also look to the performative, pragmatic level of the narrative in assessing its normative character. Generally put, in trying to advocate the conservation ethic, Leopold employs a number of ethical frameworks in performing that advocacy. There may be several levels to consider in this respect, and these may range from the most radical questions of the right and authority of the author to speak, and what norms are inherent in the generative aspects of the narrative, that is, its purposes and intents; what roles it offers to readers, and how it constructs them in that respect, to the more mundane questions of what roles and responsibilities authors and readers have (cf. Booth 1988, 125-53). It could be reasonably argued, that these performative aspects frame the thematic unity of the narrative. For example, there is no doubt that in order to create sympathy for a character, that character must be embedded in a certain normative structure, thematically designed. But the author must also anticipate that an audience's own normative structures will align with those of the text in such a manner as to evoke that sympathy in an audience. Without this alignment the narrative will lose its emotional validity for the reader: if characters meant to be sympathetic are not, then the story as a whole will fall apart, norma-

48 -g^[^



tively speaking, for the audience. As Aristotle points out, unless speakers adapt to the ethos of the audience, they will not be successful in persuasion (Rhetoric 1377b-1378a). Together, the performative aspects of the narrative reflect on the ethos of the author and the narrative as a whole. Aristotle's remarks on the rhetorical speech also aptly apply to narratives:

. . . since rhetoric is concerned with making a judgment ... it is necessary not only to look to the argument, that it may be demonstra- tive and persuasive but also [for the speaker] to construct a view of himself as a certain kind of person and to prepare the judge; for it makes much difference in regard to persuasion. . . . that the speaker seem to be a certain kind of person and that his hearer suppose him to be disposed toward them in a certain way . . . (Rhetoric 1377b)

HOW NARRATIVES JUSTIFY

We can use these aspects of the narrative to disclose its normative features; their justification is met in a different manner. The story persuades by presenting a logical explanation, a pathetic proof, and a palpable demonstration of good ethos. The logical or explanatory proof of narrative is found principally in what we have called the followability of the narrative, that is, the concatenation of events. In this manner the narrative employs a variety of explanations for the presence and interrelation of the events in the story. This is certainly evident among historical, scientific, and forensic narratives, among others, but it is found in ordinary stories, both fictional and non-fictional. Even in fictional narratives, lack of plausibility is sufficient for a story to fail. Arthur Danto's early work on this matter, and the work of others subsequently, show convincingly that narratives are forms of explanation (Danto 1985, 233), and the sort of explanation they provide is not captured or exhausted by models of explanation as found in science. Danto makes his point in the context of a discussion of historical narratives:

The role of narratives in history should now be clear. They are used to explain changes, and, most characteristically, large-scale changes tak- ing place, sometimes, over periods of time vast in relationship to single human lives. It is the job of history to reveal to us these changes, to organize the past into temporal wholes, and to explain these changes at the same time as they tell what happened - albeit with the aid of the sort of temporal perspective linguistically reflected in narrative sen- tences. (1985, 255)



With some appropriate modification, this claim could also be easily ap- plied to forensic narratives, certain types of scientific narratives, but certainly the sort of nature narratives presented here by Leopold. As we'll see, he begins with the description of a disparate number of events, characters, and happenings in the domain of his observation, but by the end of Part I, provides an explanation which connects these events systematically, as part of an ecology.

But if narratives were considered simply to be another way of express- ing arguments and explanations, it would seem to be both inefficient and unnecessary. What makes narratives unique are the manner in which their explanations are also embedded in a normative assessment of those self- same events. This in turn rests on both the thematic unity of the narrative, and its embeddedness in its performative functions. The concatenation of events in a narrative is not sufficient to generate a unified story unless they are subsumed under a normative framework; so it is that narrative explanations are also embedded in normative frameworks, and that is what makes them especially unique. A forensic story in the courtroom aims to prove the guilt or innocence of a defendant; a historical narrative may give explanation to the fall of the Third Reich, but thereby also imply the de- mise of the regime was warranted. The fall marks a normative closure to these events.

To achieve the right pathetic affect, according to Aristotle, a story (or speech in this case), must be pathetically valid (Rhetoric 1356a). By this Aristotle seems to mean that the speech is so constructed that it evokes the appropriate emotion in the audience. In the case of a narrative, a tragedy, for example, is pathetically valid if it takes the right sort of character (one of high station, not too good, but not too bad), and makes him undergo the right sort of circumstances (a rise, a reversal, and a fall), such that it evokes pity and terror in the audience (cf. Poetics 1452aff). Generally speaking, pathetic validity requires the happenings, events, actions, and characters in a narrative to be normatively organized in such a manner that an audience, ideally constructed by the author, would judge characters to be worthy of certain emotional responses: sympathy, moral outrage, admiration, disgust, and so forth. For example, moral outrage is pathetically valid if it is directed towards an agent who has unjustly harmed an innocent person. The emotion is warranted if: harm has occurred to a person, and the harm was caused by this agent, whose reasons or motivations for inflicting such harm were ostensibly unjust. As Aristotle says about anger,

50 ][^J^^ - " ~ - '



it is "desire, accompanied by distress, for conspicuous retaliation because of a conspicuous slight that was directed, without justification, against oneself or those near to one" (Rhetoric 1378a). Consequently, the opposite of anger, calmness, can be instilled in an audience by demonstrating the justice of a situation. This is similarly the case with other moral emotions, such as indignation, friendliness, enmity, kindness, unkindness, admiration, and so forth. All require a normative framework to create the pathetic effect in an audience. Fictional narratives can more easily construct conditions necessary to warrant such emotions; nonfictional narratives are additionally constrained by events outside of the control of the narrator or author, and they are obligated to use those events, rather than ones made up for purposes of evoking the emotion. The emotional validity of a story is a much different consideration than the determination that an audience will, in fact, respond in such a manner. The emotional validity of a narrative justifies one in saying that people ought to feel sympathy, or outrage at these events. Whether an audience, in fact, does have the right pathetic affect, depends on a number of factors: for example, the inhibi- tion of identification with the victim, emotional pathologies, cultural con- ditioning, ordinary psychological attitudes such as boredom or disinterest. Thus, a skilled writer may be able to eliminate many of these pathological inhibitions by writing an interesting, engaging story, where the characters are drawn in a manner that would allow most people to identify with them.

The ethos of the story is proven in the ways similar to discerning someone's character, since its focus is on the normative character of the real, implied author, and any narrators that populate the story. All stories construct the reader in a certain way; and because the narrative world - especially fictional ones - can easily manipulate the story, there is potential for manipulation of the audience. In discerning the ethos of a story, we must discern whether the author exhibits goodwill or not, sets us up as a fool to be manipulated, or as Wayne Booth would say (and thereby Nussbaum) - as an Aristotelian friend - and asked to join the process of discovery and insight the story might provide (Booth 1988, 486-87). In rhetoric, the ethos of a speech has to do with the character validity of speakers: are they trustworthy, honest, sincere, accurate, and have good will and good intentions (Rhetoric 1377b20ff). The character proof - in this sense of the term - is found in the manifestation of the performative features of the narrative.

mf^-^l^ ,„-

~™^ - ™

NAR^TIvrETHICS OF

LEOPOLD 51



AN ANALYSIS OF THE STORIES OF SAND COUNTY ALMANAC The Content of Sand County Almanac

Ostensibly, the 22 narratives of Part I, relate a number of disparate, loosely connected events that follow the order of the seasons. The temporal contiguity of the narrative is not achieved so much by the causal logic of the events, as by the temporal ordering of the yearly cycle. In this regard, the stories in Part I, initially, have more the appearance of a true chronicle than a narrative - a list of events that come after one another, but do not appear to be otherwise interconnected. But unlike classical chronicles, these are adumbrated with commentary and thick description of the events, characters, and happenings.

The chronicle of the story begins in January with a winter thaw. The thaw ruins the tunnels of a mouse, and leads to its subsequent death at the hands of a rough-legged hawk; there are signs of the death of a rabbit by an owl; a skunk meanders through the woodland. In February, a lightning-struck oak is felled and sawed into wood for the fire. The narrator - who is also sawing the oak for wood - uses the rings on the tree as a mnemonic for recounting 80 years of the human activity that has affected the ecology of the region.

In March the geese return, their numbers, habits, and habitats are noted. In April the spring floods come and isolate the little farm. The smallest flower in the area, the Draba, blossoms; a story is told by the narrator of how human intervention allowed the bur oak to forest the prairie. A woodcock "dances." In May the plover returns from its summer migration in Argentina, 4,000 miles away. In June there is fishing in the creek for trout. In July a number of flora and fauna are noted. The shrinkage of the diver- sity of flora in the region is related. In August the effects of a river on its banks is described. In September the songs of various birds are observed. In October various hunts are made for grouse, geese, and partridge. In November a quandary about which kind of tree to cut is related. The effects of tree diseases and parasites are catalogued. In December the features of white, red, and jack pine are noted; and there is speculation about the probable death of a banded chicadee.

The Thematic Unity of Sand County Almanac However, the chronicle-like character of the Part I stories are deceiv-

ing. Soon - even by the second story - we are shown by the narrator the

52 J^^^



underlying infrastructure that connects these disparate events, namely a systematic ecology. Primary relationships are discussed: the prey-predator relation is illustrated by the story of the mouse and the rough-legged hawk, and the rabbit and the owl; the rabbit is, in turn, a consumer and the oak a producer. There is mutualism among the owl and oak, commensalism and phoresis among species, and there is parasitism in the existence of tree diseases. Flora and fauna grow, reproduce, and die. The stories depict generally an ecology in its yearly cycle. The causes of regime change are noted and, the implication of human actions on these changes are revealed. Through all of this, what is discovered by the naive reader is the web of relations that connect the characters and happenings, and how implicated human beings are in these set of relations. The puzzle of the disparate events is solved gradually over the course of the stories. Second, knowl- edgeable readers will begin to discern how the biotic pyramid - later to be explained in Leopold's prose - is emerging here as the explanation of these disparate events. The narrator is moving naive readers from a view they probably initially had - a lack of awareness of the integument, the infrastructure which connects the disparate individuals, and observations they see in their own part of the natural world, to a full understanding of its import.

But there is certainly more to the story than the explanation it provides. This concatenation of events, and the set of relationships that make up this ecology are embedded in a certain normative framework that is initially puzzling, but slowly revealed over time. The very first story in Part I, "January Thaw," presents two characters who seem opponents in the central conflict of the story - the meadow mouse and the rough-legged hawk. It is the thawing of snow which disorganizes the world of the meadow mouse, robbing it of the order and security found in its tunnels beneath the snow. This is a time of crisis for the mouse. But, at the same time, it is a time of opportunity for the hawk - the thaw is that which brings the rough- legged hawk to the meadows to catch these very same mice. The same event means weal to one and woe to other. Just as the newly exposed oak entices the rabbits out of their season of want, it also means threat by the owl. The portrayal of this ecology seems one of a basic conflict between its citizens. Does the norm of this ecology rise beyond this primitive frame of prey and predator? Is there a justice here, or is it simply the place where force, violence, and power play themselves out? Is it a world of Thras- ymachus, or a world of Socrates? Are we to view this world in the way in

"""^^ 53



which Blake puzzles over the existence of the "Tyger," - "Did he who made the lamb, make thee?"

In trying to impose thematic closure on the events in the first stories of Part I, the reader might experiment with common models. Perhaps the stories should be taken melodramatically - or as Northrup Frye calls them - romances (1973, 186). In a popular romance or melodrama, like Star Wars or Independence Day, the thematic unity is one of good versus evil. It is often the case that such conflicts occur between one group and another outside of itself. The focal group, the one the audience identifies with, is the purveyor of the right norms, the other group is truly other, alien, and threatens what is right. The romance always manages to find a way for perfect justice to prevail - the righteous rewarded, those who violate the right order punished, and the innocent protected from harm. Do we imag- ine, then, that these woodland scenarios are set up as a Disney romance, that the hawks and owls are villains, the mice and rabbits victims? This cannot be since the narrator's tone of indifference would lead us to believe that the only character that could count as innocent victim in this melodrama is not portrayed as such. The narrator inhibits us from finding a point of sympathy by this means.

Perhaps, then, this first story is a tragedy. In a tragedy, the conflict is within the community, and between those who should normally be allies, brothers, sisters, lovers, friends. But there is no indication that any one of these players so far introduced has upset the norms of this community - if there are ones. We have no Othello-hawk here, who in a jealous rage kills his wife; or an Iago-mouse, who envious, betrays friendship. The norms implicit in the tragedy indirectly support common norms of the group. Members within the family should love one another - father and son, hus- band and wife; the group should be allied, and no betrayal. The tragedy always shows that things end badly for those who violate such sacred norms for the group. Yet we see no such lesson here.

Nor does this seem a comedy. In the classic sense of comedy - best illustrated by A Christmas Carol - the conflict comes from a blocker, whose position of power prevents the happiness of others; true lovers are blocked from marital bliss, a deserving person is prevented from attaining what is truly theirs. But, in the end, the blocker, like Scrooge or Egeus in A Mid- summer Night's Dream, is made to see the error of his ways, those who are blocked find their bliss, and the community is a better place. But here we are witness to the death of the mouse and the rabbit. If the blockers are the



hawk and owl, they do not see the error in killing the mouse and rabbit - if it is an error. But in a comedy, those blocked would not perish. The norms implicit in a comedy are the ones indirectly supported by the tragedy - a harmony within the group through which all is well because it ends well.

These false attempts at finding a normative unity to these events un- doubtedly puzzle the naive reader. The reader must look away from these common thematic unities to more complex ones. In "The Good Oak," the second story in the series, the narrator immediately introduces us to the conflict between producer and consumer, autotrophic and heterotrophic organisms, in this case the struggle between rabbit and oak. As the narrator says, "every surviving oak is the product either of rabbit negligence or of rabbit scarcity" (1989, 7). Some day, the narrator says, a botanist will show the frequency curve of oak birth-years humps every 10 years, coin- ciding from a low in the 10-year rabbit cycle. In other words, when the oak prospers, it is because the rabbit wanes. We are tempted to describe this as a perfect zero-sum game, hence, a description of absolute competition. But the narrator comments that it is by the very means of this "per- petual battle" that both retain an "immortality." Should the rabbit prevail entirely over the oak, the rabbit will perish, just as in "Thinking Like a Mountain," the deer herd begins to die "of its own too much" (1989, 132). The rabbit will not win if it destroys this opponent. This is why we cannot say that it is a battle between good and evil - the rabbit evil, and the oak an innocent victim; for, first of all, in the previous story, we would've had to say that the rabbit was an innocent victim and the owl the villain. What we recognize is a basic factum of this ecology, that the competition or "war" between the species is what maintains the survival of each species. But do we have, then, a Hobbesian world, or a Heraclitean one - constant strife, or war as the father of all things?

But the picture Leopold presents is somewhat more complicated than this. If it is strife, it is also alliance - it is not a war of all against all. The rabbit is a primary consumer who needs the oak to sustain its existence; the owl is a secondary consumer who needs the rabbit to sustain itself, but in feeding off the rabbits, the owl helps preserve the oaks as a species. Without the oaks, the rabbits would decline - perhaps irretrievably. The mutualism between owl and oak is such that the young oak baits the rabbits which feed the owls, which helps the young oaks survive. It is this circuit of strife and alliance that sustains the citizens of this particular

"~ "" ' ^^^'

™~ x*HE

NARRATIVE

ETHICS

OF

IloTpOLD 55



ecology, and it is the strife that supports everything. What controls this process is a natural, but ironic mechanism - the very weight of rabbit popu- lation success forces its decline. The up and down cycle, like a piston of a Carnot engine, is what perpetuates the species. This dependency between species is expressed as complementary, roughly sinusoid curves, whose success is its endurance in time, a repetitive, relatively stable pattern.

We can look to the particular, primary relations in this ecology for some normative guidance. But a cursory inspection of the intuitively more positive relations, such as mutualism and commensalism, demonstrate thin moral ground indeed. Mutualism is a type of symbiosis that involves a mutual benefit - but such relationships involve co-action more than coop- eration, since there is no deliberate working together to achieve those benefits. It cannot be reasonably said, except metaphorically, that the owl and the oak have an agreement to benefit one another. As the owl acts in its own interests in feeding on the rabbit, it incidentally benefits the oak. By the very fact that the oak grows, and so offers tempting nutrition to the rabbit, it provides the possibility of a meal for the owl. Although for any one organism, mutualism is critically essential, such that all parts work together for the benefit of that organism, in the context of an ecology, mutualisms occur in opposition to other mutualisms. Granted this benefits the ecology as a whole, still it does not benefit the opposed group. Things slide downhill, morally speaking, from there: commensalism is bare toleration, predation, consumption and parasitism involve downright exploit- ative ethics.

If we look to the biotic pyramid for an ethic, that is, if we move from the analysis of the particular relations that constitute it to an emergent whole, we may still not fare much better. The biotic pyramid is constituted by a set of dependency and power relations. The rabbit depends on the oak as a producer of its protein, the owl indirectly as rabbit-prey. A is dependent upon B, if B is necessary for A's survival. In this case the protein from B is a necessary and sufficient cause of energy for A. At the same time, the means by which A acquires energy from B is to consume B. Thus, A has a power of control over the existence of B, but B is necessary for the existence of A. Consequently, should A control B in a manner that threatens the existence of B, A threatens its own existence. As Holmes Rolston says about this: "... this remarkable competition where winners by their success alter their environment and become losers, a "fortunate" aspect of the "law" of succession, a strange environmental fitness" (1987, 260).

56 ETHl'cS "B TOe'etWIRONMENT;

8(272003"



Moreover, "predator and prey or parasite and host require a co-evolution where both flourish, since the health of the predator or parasite is locked into the continuing existence, even the welfare, of prey and host" (1987, 250).

This is nothing other than a succinct description of irony which, we must conclude, thematically unifies Leopold's 22 stories of Part 1. Irony, along with tragedy, comedy and romance, is one of the four major dramatic themata, according to Northrop Frye (1973, 162), and one of the most difficult and paradoxical to understand. Kenneth Burke describes its dramatic logic perfectly: "... the developments that led to the rise will, by the further course of their development, "inevitably" lead to the fall. "What goes forth as A, returns as non-A. This is the basic pattern that places the essence of drama and dialectic in the irony of the "peripety," the strategic moment of reversal" . . . . " (1969, 517). Those very virtues which allow Oedipus to succeed to the position of the king, act as the very flaws of his downfall. More generally Burke says - and this is expressed in the more modern ironies, such as Orwell's 1984, Kafka's The Trial, or Eliot's The Wasteland - that "true irony" is based on a "fundamental kinship" with the opponent: "one needs him, is indebted to him, is not merely outside him as an observer but contains him within, being consubstantial with him"(1969, 514). In irony, the differentiation between good and evil is palpably diminished; the protagonist is likely to be as flawed as any an- tagonist. What is eliminated from such a theme is a sense of superiority, and replaced by humility. It is, as Burke says, allied with the logic of dialectic, both in the Socratic and Hegelian sense. The process of the dialogue, and the dialectical movement itself, requires an opponent, upon which the success of the dialogic process depends. It is only in the posture of igno- rance and the humility that comes with it, that Socrates can hope to gain some wisdom from the outcome; conversely, it is only converting the young Meno's sense of arrogance and superiority, for example, that he might also gain such wisdom.

In turn, Hegel's master-slave dialectic can be viewed as describing the ironic logic of dependency. Applying it to the biotic pyramid foils any hier- archical interpretation. It is tempting to say on the basis of the visual metaphors and tropes of the pyramid design - the verticalness of A above B, and the fact that A is fewer in number than the many Bs - that B is for the sake of A. Autotrophic organisms pass on energy to heterotrophic ones, specifically through consumers, then through primary and secondary preda-

""-"""j^^ 57



tors. But entropy rather than teleology requires that there be fewer heterotrophic organisms than autotrophic ones in any ecology. It is just as easy for those who are supplied by energy as it is for those who supply the energy to fall off the pyramid. There is no reason why Homo sapiens is particularly needed to maintain the order of the biotic pyramid. If anything, the biotic pyramid should be translated into a trophic sphere, nicely articulated by Leopold: "Food is the continuum in the Song of the Gavilan. I mean, of course, not only your food, but food for the oak which feeds the buck who feeds the cougar who dies under an oak and goes back into acorns for his erstwhile prey. This is one of many food cycles starting from and returning to oaks, for the oak also feeds the jay who feeds the gos- hawk " (1989, 153). If anything there are no winners or losers among species in the normal, stable functioning of the biotic pyramid; the pyramid is as indifferent to the scene as the narrator in "January Thaw." It is a position in many ways consistent with a materialist version of Spinoza: "Nature has no fixed aim in view and that all final causes are simply fabri- cations of men" (Ethics, Part I, Prop. 36. Appendix). However, as Spinoza also points out indirectly, from the vantage of any organism that can have a point of view, nature always seems well suited to it (Ethics Part I; Prop. 36. Appendix). However, that is not due to any ideological design, but to the evolution tautology: a species that is surviving in any ecology is well- adapted to it. The biotic pyramid is, in its essence, a flow of energy which permits the continued existence of the forms of life it has.

Any viable ecology, then, rests on ethically weak, oppressive, and ques- tionable relations; yet any good possible is made possible, ironically, by sustaining such an ecology to a degree that favors that good. Thus, for the sake of that good, the integrity of the ecology understood as the whole of its relations and its stability - the flow of energy through it, adequate to support the present forms of life - must be maintained. But what Leopold is struggling for here at this critical point is to persuade his fellow human beings that this good, yielded by the maintaining the integrity and stability of ecologies, must extend to nonhuman life. He is aided in this regard by the preparatory attitude of humility engendered by the ironic theme, but also logically, in an implicit argument that could be filled out by the readers: Because the struggles and suffering of nonhuman life make possible our good, then by the dictates of our own fundamental ethics we must reciprocate by including other living beings into the net of our ethical consideration. A good citizen of this ecology, a "fellow-traveler" as Leopold

58 ]^^^



deems it, is indebted to the other citizens and travelers. "Man and beast, plant and soil lived on and with each other in mutual toleration, to the mutual benefit of all" (1989, 99). It rests implicitly on a sturdy presump- tion of justice: Each who contributes to the good of the whole should benefit from its configuration, in the manner in which they can, and to an extent compatible with the good of others. Even though these other nonhuman forms of life do not consciously reciprocate, do not enter specific contracts, do not form obligations towards us, and some seek in their very nature to harm us - all of that makes possible our own good. We act un- ethically when we configure this order such that it benefits ourselves alone. To effect this realization Leopold wants to add one more dimension to his argument here - and that is the emotional.

THE EMOTIONAL VALIDITY OF SAND COUNTY

In the stories of Part I, the primary means by which Leopold attempts to persuade us that we must consider the good of nonhuman life is by means of a pathetic proof (understood in a manner explained previously). Later in Part II, he explicitly expresses the particular sentiment he wants us to get: "It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow- voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise" (1989, 109). In realizing that we are all bound to an order that we endure, that through this endurance we manage to make each other thrive - this realization should give us a new valuation of other forms of life.

Leopold attempts to move the reader towards this sentiment by means of identification and sympathy. Personification is the literary device he most frequently uses to achieve this - but in many respects he attempts to show, as an ecological fact, the "humanity" so to speak of nonhuman species. In February, we learn to mourn the loss of the good oak (1989, 9) - and through the eyes of the narrator, its 80 years of existence is made unique, and its center in the web of ecological relationships made manifest. What makes the oak "good", then, in Leopold's title of this February story? The oak stands at the intersection of these various types of ecological relations, and so can become a symbol of it all. Human beings use it for warmth; June bugs defoliate it; the squirrels feed off its acorns all winter long. Dis-

JAMES JAK6B LISZKA THE NARRATIVE ETHICS OF LEOPOLD 59



ease attacks the oaks, but its windfalls provide hiding places for grouse, and its diseased leaves and gall, food for them as well. Bees find a home in hollow oaks; the dead bark of trees is a treasury of eggs, larvae and co- coons for the chickadees. But the oaks, too, are invaders of the grasslands that once dominated their area. As soon as humans in sufficient numbers plowed these fields and stopped the fires that once periodically consumed this area, the oaks and other trees and shrubs began to flourish. The "Good" Oak, as the title of this story suggests, is the one that fully participates in this ecology of relations - it is benefactor, but also beneficiary. Like a good soldier, the oak has served 80 years in its ecological duty, and as such it deserves our respect, admiration, and sympathy.

In March, the narrator proclaiming his stern and indifferent scientific stance cannot, nonetheless, "impute a disconsolate tone" to the honking of the lone geese, and come to the conclusion that "they are broken-hearted widowers, or mothers hunting lost children (1989, 21). Like us, the ducks form families and kin relations, care for their young, and feel at their loss. The lone ducks are "bereaved survivors of the winter's shooting, searching in vain for their kin." The narrator says, "now I am free to grieve with and for the lone honkers" (1989, 22). In April the woodcock does it sky dance, seeking romance and a mate (1989, 30ff). After observing the bird's sky dance, the narrator is now changed: "The woodcock is a living refutation of the theory that the utility of a game bird is to serve as a target, or to pose gracefully on a slice of toast" (1989, 34). The observations of the sky dance make the narrator realize that the bird is driven by the same biology as us - to seek a mate, to have young. In May we become intimate with the struggles of the plover in its migration from Argentina, such that it is a great relief to the reader that it was the federal migratory bird laws which saved these birds from extinction by hunters' guns (1989, 37). In June we learn "how like fish we are, ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time" (1989, 39).

By the time of July, the reader is prepared to accept the narrator's point of view, and feel the full impact of the loss of species, since it means the loss of every individual of it, and every future individual of it. The narrator wryly remarks, "the erasure of a human subspecies is largely pain- less - to us - if we know little enough about it. ... We grieve only for what we know" (1989, 48). Indeed, by now we have come to know the members of the Sand County ecology, and we grieve their disappearance, so much so that the table of diminishing species (1989, 47) has the same

60 l^WI^



impact as a newly arrived list of war dead. We see now in November what a struggle it is to decide which tree to cut. This is no longer a matter of simply getting wood for heat, it is a decision that has an impact on living, working, and thriving members of this ecology - that what the human individual does to the ecology affects these other individuals living in it. The trees are no longer thought exclusively in terms of their use-value. They have an aesthetic value, a character-value that engenders partiality and special concern and care. Our biases are the result of caring for the land, they are "indeed a sensitive index to our affections, our tastes, our loyal- ties, our generosities " (1989, 72). It is because we can only care about the individual members of this ecology, that we come to care about the system that supports it. But by that very constraint, we are also partial in our care and concern. This, of course, is manifest in the evolution of our own ecological conscience - from conservation for our own sakes, to the special treatment of species and aesthetically spectacular lands, to the rec- ognition of the importance of the ecology for beings other than ourselves.

The axe and the shovel become the metaphors for humans' partiality, and for the effect on the ecology. "It is a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signa- ture on the face of his land" (1989, 68). The transformation that the narrator wants us to undergo is one in which we care about the ecology not just for our sakes, but also for the sakes of those other beings living in it. This sentiment is acquired without the expectation of reciprocity, "for one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. The Cro-Magnon who slew the last mammoth thought only of steaks Had the funeral been ours, the pigeons would hardly have mourned us. In this fact. . . . lies objective evidence of our superiority over the beasts" (1989, 110). But, as we have seen, this is an ironic superiority that engenders our humility in the face of the order of things, "above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest These things, I say, should have come to us. I fear they have not come to many" (1989, 110).

THE PERFORMATIVE NORMS OF SAND COUNTY ALMANAC

Ostensibly, Leopold's goal in writing Sand County Almanac is to persuade its readers to the side of conservation. Yet we must consider the

._™_^^ 61



ethics of how this is performed. It is here that we would find the means for revealing something about the ethos of the book and its author. In pursuit of this analysis, we should keep in mind questions concerning the real author and his intentions for the work, questions about the implied author, as gleaned from the overall affect of the story, and from the voice and focalization of the narrator(s) (cf. Booth 1988, 128, 457). Similarly, we must also distinguish the real reader - understood as the actual reception of a narrative by a specific reading public - from the implied reader - the sort of role, meaning, and normative pre-configuration the text sets for the reader (cf. Iser 1978, 34ff). The implied author, as Booth says, is the case where "the author creates ... an image of himself and another image of his reader, he makes his reader, as he makes his second self. ..." (1963, 137). In regard to real readers, we know that the book was in fact persuasive for a significant number of the American public. It is, in Wallace Stegner's words, "almost a holy book in conservation circles" (1987, 233). But in analyzing the implied reader, we can get more to the center of the normative character of its performatives, rather than just its rhetorical effects on an audience.

We know that Leopold struggled with the Knopf editors on the issue of the proper outlook of the book. Leopold wanted the book to be an outright argument for conservation; the Knopf editors wanted it to be "what-I-saw-while-in-the-woods" book, as Leopold put it (Ribbens 1987, 93). Part I is Leopold's compromise. There must have been the temptation for Leopold to use these stories as allegories for his conservation ethic. Indeed, some of the earlier versions of the shack stories were published in 1941 and 1942 in The Wisconsin Agriculturalist and Farmer as conservation essays for farmers (Ribbens 1987, 92). As shown by his letters to his student and illustrator, Hans Hochbaum, Leopold also struggled mightily with the tensions between the right ethical judgment he wanted his readers to make about ecological matters and the literary character of the writings (Ribbins 1987, 95). He felt that showing readers the evidence sufficient to make the right moral judgment might interfere with the literary effect of the writings, and conversely. By the time he sends his first version of the book to the Knopf editors, he is convinced that he has succeeded in this regard, since he feels he does not have to include the prose pieces that make up Part III of the book as we now know it, "the object, which should need no elaboration if the essays are any good, is to convey an ecological view of the land and conservation" (quoted in Ribbens 1987, 97). But

62 J^^^



Knopf rejects the manuscript on the basis that there is no unity to the pieces and, in any case, they are not narrative enough (Ribbens 1987, 98- 99).

In his disappointment, Leopold worked to provide more narrative, and employed the device of a yearly cycle of events to provide thematic unity to the shack sketches. He thought also he could add the famous prose pieces of Part III after all - to extend the book's length. But when he sent these further revisions to Knopf they voiced the same complaints: lack of the right sort of narrative, lack of unity and, furthermore, there was no way to unify the sketches and stories with the prose pieces. Moreover, the editors found the prose pieces "fatuous," and "the ecological argument everyone finds unconvincing. ..." (quoted in Ribbens 1987, 102). This time, however, Leopold is less willing to accept the criticisms of the Knopf editors. Although he continued to work on the manuscript with the Knopf criticisms in mind, he sent the manuscript off to other publishers. As we know, Oxford University Press accepted it in April 1948. Thus, Leopold's final product is much more narrative than he intended it to be, but because he was driven by motive to argue for the conservation ethic, the purpose of these narrative sketches in Part I are most likely intended to be persuasive in that respect.

If Leopold intends his book to be persuasive in its argument for the conservation ethic, how does he set up and construct his implied reader? What is Leopold's ethical posture towards this audience? In the 1947 Fore- word to his manuscript (in what was then called Great Possessions), Leopold is rather gruff about his purpose for writing the book. He says, "these essays were written for myself and my close friends, but I suspect that we are not alone in our discontent with the ecological status quo. If the reader finds here some echo of his own affections and of his own anxieties, they will have accomplished more than was originally intended" (Leopold 1947, 288). Here the tone suggests he is writing to a restricted, elite audience who, like himself, understands the true importance of conservation. If the reader already thinks this way, then he will recognize the truths of this book, if not, then the book is not for him. In the beginning of the 1947 Foreword, Leopold, the author, conveys an ethos of disgust for the behav- ior of humans towards the land, and the general tenor of the essay is a chronicle of his own importance in the development of the conservation movement. However, despite this haughtiness, he does admit his own errors and the role he played in the regional extinction of various predators.

^^___^_ 63



But he is puzzled as to why others have not moved on to the revelation he has received about these errors. Leopold's writing reflects a sarcasm that certainly borders on cynicism and ridicule of anyone who might not already agree with his position. In effect, those who might possibly disagree with his position, or would not understand it, are un-invited from reading. This Foreword is a call to the like-minded reader, and for solidarity in the conservation effort.

But, of course, Leopold wrote a second, different foreword to the final draft of the book, and the fact that he never had a chance, as he intended, to include the earlier one as an appendix to the published work may have been fortuitous. Compared with the 1947 Foreword, the tenor of the 1948 one, published with the book as we know it, is somewhat friendlier and inviting. Here the writer is more humble, although still occasionally burst- ing out with contempt for the unsaved, "we of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not" (1949, vii); "the whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs that it has lost the stability necessary to build them, or even to turn off the tap" (ix) . . . The opening paragraph rather than scowling at the rabble, simply points out that there are those who can live without wilderness and those who cannot, and what follows is written by one who cannot. It makes no immediate condemnation of those who can. In the brief remainder of the foreword, he sketches the outline of his work, showing more warmly how the shack sketches were made in the context of his family enjoying each other in the enjoyment of the semi-wildlands at the Wisconsin land.

The two Forewords show Leopold, the implied author, working in the normative tension among a variety of ethical postures towards the reader; the result is that there is no exact center to them. These postures are constituted primarily by the roles which the author offers the reader, and the normative framework it implies. I believe they can be articulated in a manner that echo the principal dramatic genres, comedy, romance, irony, and satire. First, just as all genres have a conflict and opponent process, so too we can cast the implied author-reader role in terms of alliance or opposition: is the implied author treating the reader as an opponent or as a potential ally? If an ally, we can further adumbrate that role in Booth's terms as kinds of friendships (cf. Booth 1988, 179ff). Second, in what manner, in the broadest strokes, are those alliances or conflicts normatively framed, comedically, ironically, romantically, satirically? If comedic, and the author casts the reader as an opponent, the goal is to convert and transform



that opponent, and this is possible because the opponent is viewed as mis- informed but salvageable, and simply needs to be enlightened about conservation. But here the posture must be delicate. If the ethos conveys haughtiness, the reader may feel she is being played for a fool. The author must imply humility, such that the role offered the reader feels like an invitation to judge and reflect, to be shown something of which the reader may be persuaded or not. Certainly there is some of this posture in Leopold, but it does not predominate. If the performative relation between implied author-reader is framed as a romance or melodramatically, then rarely is it the case that the opponent is invited in a positive reading role; more typically the opponent is the target, and the reader is implied as a potential ally against that opponent; the goal typically is to exhort the reader towards the right side, towards her duty. The opponent is not salvageable, but can only be defeated. We see some of this framework in Leopold's prose, in the language of the A/B cleavage in the prose essays, between those who view nature as a commodity, and those who view it biotically (1949, 221). The satiric posture is similar but subtly different - the opponent is also not salvageable, but its goal is not hortatory, but to present an expose, whose target is the hypocrites, the blind and foolish. Often we see this tone in Leopold. A reader, then, is implied as one who is ripe for recognizing what the author is about to reveal.

Leopold faced another problem which was how to construct the narrator's voice. The letters to his collaborator, Hans Hochbaum, show Leopold's struggling with the right tone and character for the narrator. Hochbaum complained about Leopold's initial draft of many of the sketches that now make up Part I and II. They seemed to lack an overarching theme, and the tone of the narrator was "elitist and cynical" (Ribbens 1987, 95). He encouraged Leopold to reframe the narrator as more of a self-portrait, in which the narrator struggles with his own transformation, "the lesson you wish to put across is the lesson that must be taught - preservation of the natural. Yet it is not easily taught if you put yourself above other men" (quoted in Ribbens 1987, 96). In other words what Hochbaum wants is the narrator to take a comedic posture towards the reader, and to aid in the transformation of the reader by showing the reader his own transformation. This ironic tinge will create the right ethos of humility for this audience. Leopold took Hochbaum's advice to a large degree, so that "Thinking Like a Mountain," in Hochbaum's view, "fills the bill perfectly" (quoted in Ribbens 1987, 96). Thus, what we see in the pieces in Part I and

___»_ 65



Part II is another story above the content of the stories told - the story of the narrator's own realizations, revelations, and transformations.

In the end, however, there is no strong center to the normative aspect of performing Sand County Almanac. At this level it is an inconsistent mixture of romantic, comedic, and satiric voices, all of which emerge or rise at various points in any one story. Nonetheless, readers have obvi- ously self-selected its voice, conservationists find it a call to combat opponents of conservation, others have been transformed into conservationists by it, while still others are affirmed by its condemnation of the basic hope- lessness and hypocrisy of human relations to nature. In any case, Leopold invites us to live a greater life because it includes the consideration of nature. If there are some "who can live without wild things," then they are poorer for it.

CONCLUSION I'm suggesting that this narrative reading of Sand County Almanac

may affect the traditional understanding of the land ethic in two important ways, first, there is less emphasis in the narratives on an over-arching community, and more on the metaphor of other living things as "fellow travelers" in the "odyssey of evolution." Indeed, as Callicott has noted, the land ethic essay stresses the language of 'community' and progressively de-emphasizes the notion of 'fellow travelers' - reference to which drops out of the land ethic imperative altogether (1999, 68). In the narratives we are certainly shown what might be counted as genuine communities, but they are constituted by relations among members of their own kind in terms of kinship and association. Because they are not unlike our own communities, Leopold is able to generate sympathy and concern for their members; and because they contribute to the functioning of the ecological order he shows us why we should admire, respect, and appreciate these fellow travelers.

Second, the narratives make palpable the manner in which our fellow travelers are framed and constrained by an ironic ecological order. Al- though not constituted by ethically admirable relations, this order manages to produce anything that is ethically admirable and aesthetically sublime. The order forces all its living constituents to use and compete with other living things simply in order to live, "the only truth is that its members must suck hard, live fast, and die often" (1989, 107). Leopold's attitude towards this order alternates between its sublime appreciation and

66 J^J^^



a Stoic indifference but - nonetheless - always with a feeling of kinship and sympathy for our fellow travelers who must live under its relentless constraint.

Thus, third, the narrative reading suggests some temperance to the usual holistic interpretation of his land ethic. We should not take the land ethic imperative at its face value, in the sense that the good of the order itself is an intrinsic good. The narratives place an emphasis on individuals and what must be suffered and endured within this order. Individuals are shown not to be merely cogs in the turning of the ecological wheels, but the focus of sympathy and concern, in a manner that demands their good should also be an object of moral consideration.

By now we are quite familiar with a number of serious criticisms of Leopold's land ethic as traditionally understood, first, that its ethical holism engenders a totalitarian ethic (Aiken 1984, 269; Regan 1983, 262; Shrader-Frechette 1996, 63); second that it commits us to a functionalist ethics, which bases ethical worthiness on function or contribution to a whole; third that it demands unilateral ethical obligations on the part of humans, since there can be no intentional reciprocity on the part of anything nonhuman (Passmore 1974); third, that an ecology is not a community, but functional co-action (Rolston 1987); and four, the core notions of stability and integrity of the land are ecologically problematic concepts (Shrader-Frechette 1998). Although the narrative interpretation does not address all these criticism, it may douse the fire in the charge of ecofacism, and may help temper some of these other criticisms.

REFERENCES

Aiken, W. 1984. "Ethical Issues in Agriculture." In Earthbound, New Introduc- tory Essays in Environmental Ethics, Edited by T. Regan. New York: Random House, 74-288.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Edited by R. McKeon. Translated by W.D. Ross. New York: Random House, 1941.

. Poetics. Edited by R. McKeon. Translated by Ingram Bywater. New York: Random House, 1941.

. Rhetoric. Edited by R. McKeon. Translated by W. Rhys Roberts. New York: Random House, 1941.

Arras, John. 1997. "Nice Story, But So What." In Stories and Their Limits. Edited by Hilde Lindemann Nelson. New York: Routledge, 65-88.

Attridge, Derek. 1999. "Innovation, Literature, Ethics, Relating to the Other," PMLA 114(1), 20-32.

~*^^ 67



Booth, Wayne. 1963. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1988. The Company We Keep. Berkeley: University of California Press. Buell, Lawrence. 1999. "In Pursuit of Ethics," PMLA 114(1), 7-20. Burke, Kenneth. 1969. Four Master Tropes. Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press. Burrell, David and Stanley Hauerwas. 1977. "From System to Story, An Alterna-

tive Pattern for Rationality in Ethics." In The Foundations of Ethics and its Relationship to Science. Edited by H. Engelhardt and D. Callahan. Hastings- on-Hudson, Hastings Center.

Callicott, J. Baird. 1979. "The Elements of an Environmental Ethic, Moral Considerability and the Biotic Community." In In Defense of the Land Ethic. Albany: SUNY Press, 1989, 63-74.

. 1987. "The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic." In Companion to A Sand County Almanac. Edited by J. Baird Callicott. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 186-220.

. 1999. Holistic Environmental Ethics and the Problem of Ecofacism. Al- bany: SUNY Press, 59-78.

Chambers, Ross. 1984. Story and Situation. Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Chambers, Tod. 1997. "What to Expect from an Ethics Case (and What It Expects from You). " In Stories and Their Limits. Edited by Hilde Lindemann Nelson. New York: Routledge, 171-84.

. 1996. "Dax Redacted, The Economies of Truth in Bioethics," Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 21, 287-302.

Charon, Rita. 1997. "The Ethical Dimensions of Literature." In Stories and Their Limits, Edited by Hilde Lindemann Nelson. New York: Routledge, 92-112.

Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Childress, James. 1997. "Narrative(s) versus Norm(s)." In Stories and Their Lim-

its. Edited by Hilde Lindemann Nelson. New York: Routledge, 252-71. Clouser, K. Danner. 1996. "Narrative, Literature, and the Clinical Exercise of Prac-

tical Reason," Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 21, 303-20. Danto, Arthur. 1985. Narration and Knowledge. New York: Columbia University

Press. Eldridge, Richard. 1989. On Moral Per sonhood, Philosophy, Literature, Criticism,

and Self-Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frank, Arthur. 1995. The Wounded Storyteller. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press. Frye, Northrop. 1973. The Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University

Press. Gallie, W.B. 1968. Philosophy and the Historical Understanding. New York:

Schocken Books.

68 Iraics^^



Hegel, Georg. 1962. On Tragedy. Edited by Anne and Henry Paolucci. New York: Harper and Row.

Hinchman, Lewis and Hinchman, Sandra, 1997. Memory, Identity, Community. Albany: SUNY Press.

Hunter, Montgomery. 1991. Doctors' Stories, The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Iser, Wolfgang. 1978. The Act of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Jonson, Albert and Toulmin, Stephen. 1988. The Abuse of Casuistry. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kermode, Frank. 1967. The Sense of an Ending, Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lauritzen, Paul. 1996. "Ethics and Experience. The Case of the Curious Response," Hastings Center Report 26, 6-15.

Leitch, Thomas. 1986. What Stories Are. Narrative Theory and Interpretation. State College: Penn State University Press.

Leopold, Aldo. 1947. Foreword to Great Possessions. Companion to A Sand County Almanac. Edited by J. Baird Callicott. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 281-288.

. 1949. A Sand County Almanac. Introduction by Robert Finch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Levine, Peter. 1998. Living Without Philosophy. On Narrative, Rhetoric, and Morality. Albany: SUNY Press.

Maclean, Marie 1988. Narrative as Performance, The Baudelarian Experiment. New York: Routledge.

Maclntyre, Alisdair. 1981. After Virtue. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. McCormick, Peter. 1988. Fictions, Philosophies, and the Problems of Poetics. Ithaca:

Cornell University Press. Meine, Curt. 1987. "Aldo Leopold's Early Years." In A Companion to A Sand

County Almanac. Edited by J. Baird Callicott. Madison:University of Wiscon- sin Press, 17-39.

Miller, J. Hillis. 1986. The Ethics of Reading. New York: Columbia University Press.

Montello, Martha. 1997. "Narrative Competence. Stories and Their Limits." In Edited by Hilde Lindemann Nelson. New York, Routledge, 185-97.

Nelson, Hilde, Editor. 1997. "Introduction." In Stories and Their Limits. New York: Routledge.

Newton, Adam Zachary. 1995. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

. 1997. "Humanism with a (Post)Social Face, A Reply to Daniel Schwarz," Narrative 5(2), 207-221.

JAMES JAKdB LISZKA THE NARRATIVE ETHICS OF LEOPOLD 69



Nussbaum, Martha. 1990. Love's Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press. Parker, David. 1994. Ethics, Theory and the Novel Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press. Passmore, John. 1974. Man's Responsibility for Nature, Ecological Problems and

Western Traditions. New York, Scriber's. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1977. Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Preston, Christopher. 2001. "Intrinsic Value and Care, Making Connections

Through Ecological Narratives," Environmental Values 10, 243-263. Ribbens, Dennis. 1987. "The Making of A Sound County Almanac." In A Com-

panion to A Sand County Almanac. Edited by J. Baird Callicott. Madison: Uni- versity of Wisconsin Press, 91-109.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative. 3 vols. Translated by K. McLauglin and D. Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rolston, Holmes. 1987. "Duties to Ecosystems." In A Companion to A Sand County Almanac. Edited by J. Baird Callicott. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Rorty, Richard. 1991. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schwarz, Daniel. 1997. "Performative Saying and the Ethics of Reading, Adam Zachary Newton's Narrative Ethics," Narrative 5(2), 188-206.

Shrader-Frechette, Kristin. 1996. "Individualism, Holism, and Environmental Eth- ics," Ethics & the Environment 1, 55-69.

.1998. "Ecological Sense and Environmental Nonsense," Reflections, Spe- cial Issue 3.

Siebers, Tobin. 1992. Morals and Stories. New York, Columbia University Press. .1990. The Ethics of Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Spinoza, Baruch. 1674. Ethics. Translated by R. Elwes. New York: Dover, 1955. Stegner, Wallace. 1987. "The Legacy of Aldo Leopold." In A Companion to A

Sand County Almanac. Edited by J. Baird Callicott. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 233-45.

Tallmadge, John. 1987. "Anatomy of a Classic." In A Companion to A Sand County Almanac. Edited by J. Baird Callicott. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 110-27.

White, Hay den. 1987. The Content of the Form. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni- versity Press.

70 JJj^



leopold land ethics

Documents