"Nurturing a Land Ethic - In the Footsteps of Aldo Leopold" by Melissa Fu

I have a not-so-secret agenda nestled in my stewardship of storytelling. I’d even call it a mission. My hope is that this work contributes to people articulating and nurturing their own personal versions of the land ethic.

What is the land ethic? Visionary conservationist Aldo Leopold (1887-1947), the father of wildlife ecology, coined the term to embody the relationship he thought humans should have with the natural world. Instead of seeing nature simply as something to dominate or as a source of economic gain, he advocated an ethical relationship between people and the land. As he explains in his essay, The Land Ethic, “All ethics so far evolved 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 include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” After expanding the idea of community to include the land, Leopold explains how embracing a land ethic shifts our role in the community: “In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.”

As part of my residency, I led a series of workshops for public engagement. At the heart of each workshop was a motivation to promote the land ethic through community building. While planning the activities and prompts, I kept revisiting the question: How do we practice being good citizens of the land-community and respect our fellow citizens the soils, waters, plants and animals? Taking inspiration from Leopold’s belief that we can be “ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love or otherwise have faith in,” I was drawn to the idea that we can nurture a land ethic through articulating our love for a place.

My first workshop, Storytelling through Objects, invited people to bring along an object or artefact they associated with Valles Caldera. The objects were intended to be jumping off points for discussions around what Valles Caldera means to each of us. Multiple people brought some form of obsidian. While each obsidian story was specific to the teller, the preponderance of obsidian was fascinating. In fact, I ended up writing the piece Obsidian Valley as a meditation on the enchantment of that glassy, volcanic black rock. One of the rangers brought a NPS hat, signifying her own role at Valles Caldera. Someone else brought a straw sunhat, sharing how the hat holds memories of rain, sweat, and sunshine during Valles Caldera hikes. Another participant brought a knot of pitchwood, as a source of light and warmth and in homage to the wisdom of the forests here. Embedded in this story was the idea that if we take care of the trees, the trees will take care of us. My object was a ponderosa pinecone, representing the species I love and miss the most when I’m away from Northern New Mexico.

Sharing our objects and stories was a way of building bridges towards each other via our connections with Valles Caldera. The workshop concluded with everyone knowing a little bit more about each other and the ways we value this land. I felt deeply honored by the participants’ willingness to share, play, and build together.

How do we practice being good citizens of the land-community and respect our fellow citizens the soils, waters, plants and animals?

Maybe good citizenship starts with noticing the non-human members of the land-community and acknowledging their roles and contributions in our interconnectedness.

For my second workshop, Right Here, Right Now, I wanted to engage with the community of Valles Caldera right in front of us. Instead of bringing an object or drawing on memories, we immersed ourselves in immediacy. Participants went outside for about 20-30 minutes with the instruction to meet the community – the soils, waters, plants and animals. They were tasked with collecting observations in the form of sentences, phrases, or words. There was no mandate to construct a coherent, philosophical reflection. The focus was on noticing. It was a scavenger hunt of observations.

When everyone reconvened, people worked in pairs to create a found poem from their collected observations. As the facilitator, I loved the opportunity to drift from group to group and eavesdrop on the collaborations. Whether people had known each other for years or had only just met that morning, the poem-making was a novel point of connection. Valles Caldera itself provided a way to connect and create together, and we spent a morning celebrating the land-community beyond the human.

How do we practice being good citizens of the land-community and respect our fellow citizens the soils, waters, plants and animals?

The idea for my third workshop, Mapping a Personal Geography, was prompted by considering that event’s audience: Los Alamos High School students. Many of my treasured memories of growing up in Los Alamos are linked to specific locations. A land ethic can be born of deep connection to place. The logic is simple: we instinctively want to protect and preserve places that hold emotional, personal meaning for us; these places are a kind of home.

We know the named places: Redondo Peak, Cerro Grande, Pajarito Mountain. But what about the unnamed places? The places not marked on a map, but tattooed on our hearts and in our memories? The playground where you crashed your best friend’s new three-speed bike and broke your arm. The willow tree you and your brother turned into an elaborate fort the summer after sixth grade. The snowy canyon trail where you had your first kiss. All these places bind us to the landscape. They make up our personal geographies. There is power in naming and claiming a geography of place. With a personal geography, the land is not simply a scenic backdrop, but integral to identity.

At the workshop, I invited the students to write, sketch, or otherwise respond to this prompt: What is your personal geography of place? Can you draw a map of it? It need not be 100% accurate, but it should include the places that make up your story with the land.

There is a kind of quiet that comes during a writing workshop when people dive into the world of their imagination. For a short time that afternoon, I felt that quiet. When we reconvened, some students shared a few lines of writing, some chose to discuss what the exercise made them think of, some participated by listening. I didn’t need to know what each person wrote or how they engaged with the prompt. But I did want to leave the possibility that the workshop sparked an idea that day, and maybe one or two of the students would take away a sense of having claimed their own personal geographies.

How do you gauge the success of workshops that aim to embrace and give language to a concept like Aldo Leopold’s land ethic? I don’t think you can. Are there specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound outcomes to report on? I don’t think there are. Workshops like this and other efforts to nurture a land ethic are a different kind of investment – one of heart and hope.

Through writing, offering workshops, listening to others’ stories in informal settings, and reading accounts of others’ experiences in Valles Caldera, we plant seedlings. Some may take root right away and others may lie dormant for years. In the end, we do our best, with good intentions and walk away. I take the long view. A personal land ethic is a web of understanding that develops in each individual one interaction, one conversation, one observation, one connection, one footstep at a time.