Up the Creek: Celebrate Leopold’s Legacy in March
Ken Blomberg is a freelance writer and longtime resident of Eau Pleine, Wisconsin. He has been a scholar of Leopold and active with our Leopold Education Project. A 1976 graduate of UWSP in Resource Management, he is currently Executive Director of the Wisconsin Rural Water Association. Ken gave us permission to reprint a column he wrote recently.
We hope you’ll take some time in March to read or reread A Sand County Almanac – it is ageless! Please post your thoughts and/or actions regarding the teachings of Leopold.
By Ken Blomberg
If you have read my column long enough, you know that on occasion, I quote, or mention Aldo Leopold – philosopher, wordsmith, hunter, naturalist, scholar and poet – whose legacy remains in his words and the people he has influenced over the years. His book, A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949, continues to impact a new generation of conservationists across the country.
Since 2004, the first Wisconsin weekend of March has been dedicated to Aldo Leopold’s memory and marks the anniversary date of the Almanac’s “Foreword”, in which he wrote, “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.”
My journey with Leopold’s words began more than thirty years ago – a trail that started at the university with the Almanac as an environmental ethics class textbook. I took a few passages to heart and to this day each fall, follow my bird dogs “from one red lantern to another…partridge hunting…a creekside stroll, upwind, from one briar patch to another.”
In addition, my love affair with woodcock can be traced back to Leopold’s essay “Sky Dance”, where his words fly off the page, fluttering “skyward in a series of wide spirals, emitting a musical twitter. Up and up he goes, the spirals steeper and smaller…then, without warning, he tumbles like a crippled plane, giving voice in a soft liquid warble that a March bluebird might envy.”
While exploring back roads along the Wisconsin River some years ago, I stumbled on “the shack”, which is nestled in the woods 91 miles downstream from our home. From the road and through a pair of binoculars, I spied on his family’s “week-end refuge from too much modernity”. This modest structure proved to be the setting that inspired much of the masterpiece manuscript which later became A Sand County Almanac. Subsequently, I have visited “the shack” many times and with supervision, toured the very spots that stirred his creative juices.
I became involved in Pheasants Forever’s Leopold Education Project, as well as the Aldo Leopold Foundation and in the process, had the rare opportunity to meet and visit with several of his children, a great grandson and several graduate students that studied under the professor’s tutelage.
In two weeks, across the state, folks will gather and celebrate Aldo Leopold weekend in many ways, but most events will center on reading out loud his words from A Sand County Almanac. For a list of events, check out www.aldoleopold.org.
On Saturday, March 7th, area residents are invited to join together at 2:00 pm in Room 116 of the CPS Building at the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point, where readers have been invited to share selected passages from the Almanac’s Part 1, 2 and 3. For more information, contact me at kbgsp@tds.net.