What is a “thinking community?"

 It was late April several years ago that the Better Half and I made a pilgrimage to Wisconsin’s Sand County and visited Aldo Leopold’s “shack.” If you’ve not read A Sand County Almanac, you’ve been deprived of enjoying one of the better pieces of “nature writing” that’s been written.

Aldo Leopold’s “shack"

Photo by J. Harrington

Later today I’ll be Zooming into the first session of an online nature writing course I’ve registered for, but first I want to pose a challenge, based on Leopold’s land ethic.

Leopold also recognized that the relationship between people and each other and people and land was a complex one, and an evolutionary process. Near the end of the essay, he explains:

“I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever ‘written.’ Only the most superficial student of history will suppose that Moses ‘wrote’ the Decalogue; it evolved in the minds of a thinking community, and Moses wrote a tentative summary of it for a ‘seminar.” I say tentative because evolution never stops. The evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual as well as an emotional process.” 

Spend a little time scanning headlines or doom scrolling on social media, and I believe it will become apparent that today’s “thinking community” is not as large as it should be to support the wide-spread adoption of the land ethic we so desperately need. The challenge is: How do we first enlarge a thinking community to encompass those for whom thinking is a new and unusual experience? Or, do we expect to see evolution, over its own time scale, diminish the number of unthinking members through pandemics and similar catastrophes?

I Don’t Know What Will Kill Us First: The Race War or What We’ve Done to the Earth

Fatimah Asghar

so I count my hopes: the bumblebees
are making a comeback, one snug tight
in a purple flower I passed to get to you;

your favorite color is purple but Prince’s
was orange & we both find this hard to believe;
today the park is green, we take grass for granted

the leaves chuckle around us; behind
your head a butterfly rests on a tree; it’s been
there our whole conversation; by my old apartment

was a butterfly sanctuary where I would read
& two little girls would sit next to me; you caught
a butterfly once but didn’t know what to feed it

so you trapped it in a jar & gave it to a girl
you liked. I asked if it died. you say you like
to think it lived a long life. yes, it lived a long life.

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