At Wabash we have mutual obligations to each other; we belong to one community. So it is also with the land and us.
—by Marc Hudson
When I was in my 20s I felt a strong compulsion to get to know one place well, a wild place.
So in 1976 I headed to the Pacific Northwest to live for a year in a cabin on Hood Canal, a fiordlike arm of the Pacific, between the Olympic and Kitsap Peninsulas of Washington State. I was no Thoreau—I didn’t frame my cabin by hand nor hoe beans for my dinner. My cabin was lit by electricity and had indoor plumbing—but I owned no car in those days and hoofed the eight miles to the village of Tahuya to get my mail and groceries each week. And like Thoreau, who was a “self-appointed inspector of snowstorms,” I was the self-appointed scribe of the mists that frequented the shore and snagged in our local hemlocks. I was the semiofficial caretaker of the Hood Canal Co-op and the unofficial surveyor of its starfish, cormorants, sea crows, tideland stones, and harbor seals. Every evening I’d take the measure of the shore hills beyond the mile span of Hood Canal and the snow peaks of the Olympics rising steeply behind them.
That shore and its solitude were an important part of my liberal arts education. Day after day that shore sank into my memory and entered my journal and my poems. Friends visited and came to see what I lived for there. I was grateful for their visits and grateful when my solitude returned. For the first time in my life, I began to inhabit a particular place with the fullness of my attention.
Almost four decades later that largely solitary year remains a touchstone. Often, in memory, I go back to that cabin, and I stand in the doorway of something more intimate and immense than I knew in 1976.
The writer and ecologist Aldo Leopold said, “We can be ethical only to something we can see, feel, understand, love or otherwise have faith in.” That understanding, that affiliation with the land, began at Hood Canal for me. That shore was, I came to realize after reading Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, a community that constituted “the soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.”
You and I—and all the students, staff, and faculty—are another sort of community. We have duties and obligations to each other. For instance, dear students, when I assign a paper to you, you are obligated to read and reflect on the prompt, think it through, develop a thesis, and write a draft that explores and supports that thesis. And when you, after great labor, turn in that draft, I am compelled by an ethic deep in my professorial bones to read it carefully and thoughtfully and write some helpful commentary.
We don’t often think about it this way, but we have an ethical relationship, you and I: We have mutual obligations. We give each other moral consideration. We belong to one community. You might even say that a curious form of love animates this community.
So it is also with the land and us.
Let’s say we call the soils and sandstone strata of Montgomery County, the oaks and maples and the gray squirrels of the Arboretum, the forested valleys and cliffs of Shades, the whole groaning mass of human infrastructure, and the air that we breathe and the waters of Sugar Creek, the Sugar Creek Watershed Community.
Say it is one interlocked community on whose health and continued longevity our own health and longevity depend. Leopold wrote beautifully of it as such in the final essay of A Sand County Almanac, “The Land Ethic.” What if we owed moral consideration to the land—the source, when you think about it, of our continued biological, social, economic, and political being?
Perhaps I felt the stirrings of such an insight at Hood Canal, which Leopold would articulate for me.
I see in our community a similar stirring. Just a few weeks ago, I was astounded to observe a standing-room-only crowd of students come to watch a short green film, For the Price of a Cup of Coffee. The past several years we’ve had plenty of volunteers to tend and weed our the College’s Community Garden on workdays, and Bon Appetit has been a great partner in this enterprise. The Administration has supported the greening of Wabash.
What I hope for is a greater realization here at the College and beyond, that we engage more in sustainable practices. That we combine our astonishing gift for engineering with a land ethic and develop better clean energy technologies.
Leopold noted that “with an axe we write our signatures on the land”—I would add that with our tractors and combines, fracking and backhoes, clear-cuts and oil rigs, we’ve inscribed the name of our species deeply on this Earth. With-out a shared land ethic that signature will at best be an ugly scrawl and our lives on the land broken.
I want to think we can write with a lighter hand on this Earth. So I keep in my mind various images of how we might dwell more companionably—I think of my daughter building her chicken coop and growing her kitchen garden in the thin and burnt soil of Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico; I think of last year around Earth Day when my faculty colleagues were helping cultivate the Community Garden, the children toddling around the seeds and seedlings, the apple trees in blossom, and students hard at work with hoe and shovel. We were writing our signatures with light hands and light hearts that afternoon—and so may we again this coming Earth Day.
This will remain to me an image of “living humanely,” and the essence of compassionate action. As the Buddha, the Talmud, the Prophet Mohammed, and dear Christ enjoin us, we must give moral consideration to the least of us in the human community. The leap we need to take as a species is to give moral consideration to the land.
As Albert Schweitzer memorably put it in the last century, “Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.”
Excerpted from a Chapel Talk titled, “Becoming an Aldoholic: My Education in
the Liberal Arts,” delivered March 21, 2013.