HAPPY BIRTHDAY BECKY!!!!!!!

     Well, today is Becky's birthday.  I think she's turning 29 again, but that can be neither confirmed nor denied. Anyway, we went out for dinner last night then headed for Border's because that's pretty much our sanctuary when we have no kids with us.  Those days will soon be a faint memory so we are going to enjoy every kid free weekend until the baby is born.  Becky bought a copy of  "The Sand County Almanac" by Aldo Leopold.  She read a few essays to me aloud last night laying in bed.  The original copyright was 1949, just one year after Aldo died.  I don't know how old Aldo was when he passed, but it was his grown son that had the essays published into a book the following year.  Anyway, listening to Becky read I was struck by two things about Leopold.  First, how awestruck he was by God's creation.  Secondly, how in 1948 he was worried about the loss of wild places and fearful that mechanized man will destroy it all in the end if we don't open our eyes. Here is the forward to the book:

Forward to Sand County Almanac

     There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.  These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.

      Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them.  Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth the cost in things natural, wild and free.  For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.

    These wild things, I admit, had little human value until mechanization assured us of a good breakfast, and until science disclosed the drama of where they come from and how they live.  The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree.  We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not.

     One must make a shift with things as they are.  These essays are my shifts.  They are grouped in three parts.

     Part I tells what my family see and does at its weekend refuge from too much modernity: 'the shack'.  On this sand farm in Wisconsin, first worn out and then abandoned by our bigger-and-better society, we try to rebuild, with shovel and axe, what we are losing elsewhere.  It is here that we seek- and still find- meat from God.

     These shack sketches are arranged seasonally as a 'Sand County Almanac'.

     Part II, 'Sketches Here and There,' recounts some of the episodes of my life that taught me, gradually and sometimes painfully, that the company is out of step.  These episodes, scattered over the continent and through forty years of time, present a fair sample of the issues that bear the collective label: conservation.

     Part III, 'The Upshot,' sets forth, in more logical terms, some of the ideas whereby we dissenters rationalize our dissent.  Only the very sympathetic reader will wish to wrestle with the philosophical questions of Part III.  I suppose it may be said that these essays tell the company how it may get back in step.

    Conservation is getting nowhere because  it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land.  We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.  When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.  There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the aesthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture.

     That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.  That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.

     These essays attempt to weld these three concepts. 

     Such a view of land and people is, of course, subject to the blurs and distortions of personal experience and personal bias.  But wherever the truth  may lie, this much is crystal clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with itos own economic health as to have lost  the capacity to remain healthy.  The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs that it has lost the stability necessary to build them, or or even to turn off the tap.  Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.  

     Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things, in terms of things natural, wild and free. 

                                              

                                                                                                              Aldo Leopold

Madison, Wisconsin

4 March 1948

Well said Aldo.  Well said. 

It's amazing to me that the things Aldo said in 1948 were true in his day and even more true in ours.  Take heart and enjoy God's creation. We are meant to be stewards of the Earth.  That means conserving.  Now don't get me wrong there is nothing with consumption but in this day and age and especially in the United States we are extremely wasteful.  Our throwaway society is not wise and is not honoring to God.  I believe that the Lord put animals and plants and all of our natural resources here for us to use, but it's stupid and so disrespectful the way that we just rape the land and never give back.  We  (as Americans in general) never ask what the long term consequences of our actions are going to be.  It's time that we start making an effort to look ahead and use common sense.  A time for us to respect and fear God, the Creator of the Universe. And a time to use and enjoy his creation, our home on this side of heaven, with love and respect.  

      Not only is today Becky's birthday, but its also my mom and dad's 27th  wedding anniversary.  Pretty impressive.  I wish them another 27 and that Becky and I will do just as well as they have.  

Tate and I are going to go play catch now, maybe I'll write more later