The Singing Wilderness and A Sand County Almanac: Comparing Olson and Leopold

The Singing Wilderness, Sigurd Olson's first book, was published by Alfred A. Knopf on April 16, 1956. The narrative below, an excerpt from A Wilderness Within: The Life of Sigurd F. Olson, compares Olson's first book and the philosophy he expresses in it with that of Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac.

Here's the excerpt:

Sigurd Olson wanted The Singing Wilderness to capture the joy, the wonder, and the sense of connectedness he had experienced outdoors. As he was working on the manuscript in January 1954 he read a recent book by John Masefield called So Long to Learn, and took it as a sign that he was on the right track. Masefield had experienced the kind of epiphanies that Olson had known so well, and that, in Sigurd's mind, W.H. Hudson had come closest to capturing in print. Olson typically called these moments "flashes of insight," while Masefield described them as entering "into that greater life," but Olson could agree completely with Masefield's description of the importance of these experiences to modern society: "I believe that life [the greater life] to be the source of all that is of glory or goodness in this world; and that modern man, not knowing that life, is dwelling in death."

Masefield also lamented that "fewer and fewer men are taking the discipline of the arts as qualifications for the attempt to know that glory and to bring from it something shining for man." Olson seized on that thought as he fleshed out the manuscript early in 1954:

In the essays I am working on, each one must bring through it something shining for man. Each must tap somehow, enable men to touch that "greater life," the source of all glory, beauty, goodness in this world....If each thing I write will somehow have this illumination, this glow, this transcendant beauty, the feeling of having touched the absolute, it will be enough. I can do this by bringing in somehow my feeling for the primeval, the origins of things, the Pipes of Pan, the glory, the sense of wonder, awe, oneness with all life and the universe itself, the childlike quality soon lost of being part of that greater life.

The Singing Wilderness follows most of the standard expectations for nature writing that had evolved since 1789, when the English clergyman Gilbert White produced the genre's prototype, The Natural History of Selborne. Like most books of the sort, The Singing Wilderness imparts a vivid sense of place, contains affectionate descriptions of the flora and fauna encountered in that place, and is organized episodically, employing a standard seasonal format. But The Singing Wilderness differs from traditional nature writing in that the book's essays, while highly personal and strongly evocative of a particular place, are at the same time meant to be representative of experiences readers have already known, or can if they try. "In the chapters that follow," the introduction concludes,

I tell of my experiences in the north, but far more important than the places I have seen or what I have done or thought about is the possibility of hearing the singing wilderness and catching perhaps its real meaning. You may not hear it exactly as I did, but somewhere along the trails I have followed, you too may know the glory.

It is useful to compare the book to Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, often referred to as the bible of the modern environmental movement, although there are important differences between the two works. Some of these are stylistic. Leopold, for example, wrote with a tightly controlled pen, taking great care with the most minute details of his narrative and using extremely precise language. Olson, on the other hand, interested much more in abstract feelings, painted word pictures with a broad brush. The tone of the books also differed, reflecting quite distinct personalities. A Sand County Almanac, despite passages of beautiful description and entertaining wit, is a much darker book than The Singing Wilderness. A theme of loss, sometimes depicted with biting sarcasm, pervades Leopold's narrative. Olson, on the other hand, while critical of modern society, uses a narrative voice that most often is optimistic, and never sarcastic.

The most important difference between the two books, however, lies in their major goals. Leopold wanted A Sand County Almanac primarily to do two things: to present fundamental ecological principles in a way that would hold the interest of a nonscientific audience, and to inculcate love and respect for natural communities through what he called "the land ethic." Because the book serves as a warning to modern culture as well as a doctrine for change, and because of the charismatic power of Leopold's text, A Sand County Almanac has been described as "the utterance of an American Isaiah."

If the Leopold of A Sand County Almanac is an Old Testament prophet, then the Olson of The Singing Wilderness is a New Testament evangelist. Where Leopld invokes the God of power and wrath, preaching proper ethical behavior toward the land and prophesying doom if society disobeys, Olson invites his readers to experience the God of love, as made manifest in nature.

But A Sand County Almanac and The Singing Wilderness are no more incompatible for environmentalists than the Old and New Testaments are for Christians. Olson echoes Leopold's critique of and prescription for modern society, and Leopold echoes Olson's sense of wonder and joy. It is the different emphasis the authors give to shared goals that most distinguishes the two books. And it is this difference that makes comparing these works especially valuable, because the major contribution of The Singing Wilderness is that it provides a sustained treatment of a theme that was important to Leopold but strewn here and there in A Sand County Almanac, a theme that philosopher J. Baird Callicott has labeled "the land aesthetic."

It was a new, in fact revolutionary, aesthetic based in part upon full use of the senses. In Western culture, the dominant perspective on the beauty of nature--conceived, created, distributed and perpetuated by artists--was based almost entirely on visual stimulation. Out of this picturesque aesthetic in art arose such terms as "landscape" and "scenery" as we use them today. Natural beauty was perceived as a function of composition, as judged by the human eye according to standards of landscape painting and, eventually, photography. The national parks were selected according to this picturesque aesthetic; they were monuments of scenic beauty. And the standard remains to this day, by and large. There's the story, for example, of how the famous landscape photographer Edward Weston would sleep in the passenger seat of his car while his wife drove around the countryside, searching for anything with a "Weston look." When she found it, whe would wake him so he could photograph the scene.

In A Sand County Almanac, Leopold described the picturesque aesthetic as merely a beginning, and claimed that appreciation of beauty is greatly enhanced bu such nonvisual sensory stimuli as the trumpeting of a sandhill crane, the ruch smell of soil after a rain, the taste of ripe blackberries, and the warmth of sun on the skin. What was revolutionary, however, was his declaration that, in addition to full use of the senses, a true land aesthetic required a mind informed by knowledge of evolution and ecology. In the essay "Marshland Elegy," he writes that "our appreciation of the crane grows with the slow unraveling of earthly history.

His tribe, we now know, stems out of the remote Eocene. The other members of the fauna in which he originated are long since entombed within the hills. When we hear his call we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of the incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.

Leopold professed that knowledge of evolution deepens human perception, and that an understanding of ecology--of communities and interdependencies--boradens perception. (As Callicott points out, "We cannot love cranes and hate marshes.") A marsh does not conform to the picturesque aesthetic, but a mind informed by evolutionary and ecological biology will perceive it as beautiful and precious. "Amid the endless mediocrity of the commonplace," writes Leopold, "a crane marsh holds a paleontological patent of nobility, won in the march of aeons."

In a culture where aesthetic taste is still dominated by the picturesque, however, it is difficult to convey what a land aesthetic experience feels like. Just as Aldo Leopold did--and Sam Campbell, too--Sigurd Olson sensed that an aural metaphor, rather than a visual one, best captured its essence. Olson was less direct than Leopold, but the land aesthetic permeated The Singing Wilderness, from its aural-based title through each of its thirty-four essays.

Like Leopold, Olson uses knowledge of geology and evolution to add depth to perception. A piece of greenstone is much more than a rock--it is "part of the original crust formed when the moten lavas and gases first cooled," a symbol of the planet's enormous timespan that dwarfs human history. Caribou moss is beautiful and precious in part because it is an evolved combination of two different plants, "one whose rootlets can break down the rock [on which it grows], the other embedded deep within its tissues, a green and globular alga." Referring to frogs calling in a bog at night, he writes:

This is a primeval chorus, the sort of wilderness music which reigned over the earth millions of years ago. That sound floated across the pools of the carboniferous era. You can still hear it in the Everglades: the throaty, rasping roar of the alligators and, above tha, the frightened calls and screams of innumerable birds. One of the most ancient sounds on earth, it is a continuation of music from the past, and, no matter where I listen to a bog at night, strange feelings stir within me.

Like Leopold, Olson also uses ecological knowledge to broaden perception. The caribou moss, for example, not only has an interesting evolutionary background, but plays an important ecological role: "Those silvery little tufts before me are the shock troops of the north, the commandos with which the plant kingdom made a beachhead on a barren, rocky ridge. Surviving where other types would die, needing nothing but crystalline rocks and air, they prepare the way for occupation and for the communities to come." The lesson is clear: To paraphrase Callicott, we cannot love pines, cedars, and junipers, and hate caribous moss. Olson, not surprisingly, often displays a special fondness for those elements of the natural world that don't fit traditional notions of beauty: he enjoys scrub oaks and rocks and tamaracks, and declares that "swamps are always a pleasure."

But Olson's land aesthetic is not a clone of Leopold's. One important difference, for example, is in the level of trust each writer places in science. "Science," says Leopold, "contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world. Its great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view. This means doubting everything except facts; it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may." Olson, on the other hand, uses "facts" and theories generated by scientific research, but fears that scientific rationalism has gained far too much power in society. Time and again he made it clear that scientific knowledge is an aid to understanding and appreciation, nothing more. "To be sure," he writes in an essay about weasels called "The River," "the ecological factors are important--the endless cycle of carnivores and herbivores, the inevitable assimilation of vegetable matter to flesh and blood and back again....but what really counts is how [weasels] make me feel and how they contribute to the character and quality of wilderness."

In fact, Olson worried that scientific knowledge, because of its claims to objectivity, could overrun less empirical beliefs that contained genuine truths of equal or even greater importance to humans. In the essay "Northern Lights," for example, after giving the standard scientific explanation for the aurora borealis, Olson presents another, competing description he had learned as a child, one based on American Indian mythology. He could believe what the scientists had discovered, but expressed regret for the personal and cultural cost of such knowledge: diminishment of "the wonderment that only a child can know and a beauty that is enhanced by mystery."

Olson's land aesthetic algo goes further than Leopold's in incorporating humans. In the essay "Pools of the Isabella," for example, Olson shows how the appreciation of a wild place can deepen through human associations. "During the many years I have fished the Isabella," Olson said, "it has become a part of me." Why? Not because it is picturesque, not because he knows its ecological history, but because each pool along the river brings back specific memories. "When I wade the Isabella," he says, "I am never alone. I always hear forgotten banter in the sounds of the rapids, the soft rhythmic swish of familiar rods. These things are as much a part of the river as the trout themselves."

Human history also plays an important role in Olson's land aesthetic. His enjoyment of Lac la Croix is enhanced by his knowledge of the location where Ojibwa warriors long ago had staged races, and by seeing the reddish-brown pictographs along the cliffs of Shortiss Island. Knowing that European fur traders had traveled the same waters a hundred fifty years earlier adds to this appreciation of human interaction with the land, and Olson writes that one who successfully navigates a stretch of spuming whitewater can hear "all the voyageurs of the past join the rapids in their shouting."

The human aspects of Olson's landscape aesthetic are not limited to the past. Several times in The Singing Wilderness Olson encounters primitive trappers' cabins in the canoe country, and, taking care to distinguish these one-room shacks from a "modern mouseproof cabin," he praises them: "Trappers' cabins are as natural as tents or teepees. They are part of the solitudes and as much a part of the wilderness as the trees and rocks themselves." And in "Pools of the Isabella," Olson, in recalling his friend and former Ely grade school principal Glenn Powers, shows that the human act of fly-fishing can also be beautiful, and in harmony with the land.

Olson's inclusion of humans in the land aesthetic stems from his concern for the spiritual and psychological health of modern society. Restating his long-held belief in what he called "racial memory," he writes in the introduction that "uncounted centuries of the primitive have left their mark upon us, and civilization has not changed emotional needs that were ours before the dawn of history." Modern society, in distancing itself from the natural world to which it belongs, has left these needs unfilled, and the result is widespread disillusionment. "We sense intuitively that there must be something more," he writes,

search for panaceas we hope will give us a sense of reality, fill our days and nights with such activity and our minds with such busyness that there is little time to think. When the pace stops we are often lost, and we plunge once more into the maelstrom hoping that if we move fast enough, somehow we may fill the void within us.

In writing The Singing Wilderness, Olson's goal was not to create a land aesthetic; that he did create one is simply a by-product of his major goal, which was to show that the unmet needs of the civilized world could be found by interacting regularly and simply with the non-civilized world. Picking berries, looking for pine knots, fly-fishing, paddling a canoe, and many other activities not only are fulfilling in themselves, but even have "ritualistic significance," as Olson points out in his essay, "Campfires." Such activities, he says, give people "an opportunity to participate in an act hallowed by the devotion of forgotten generations.

Olson implies, in fact, that the most deeply fulfilling human acts also are the acts that are most likely to be in harmony with natural processes. Paddling a canoe, therefore, becomes much more than a way to get from one point to another. "The movement of a canoe," he says in one of the book's most poetic passages, "is like a reed in the wind. Silenece is part of it, and the sounds of lapping water, bird songs, and wind in the trees. It is part of the medium through which it floats, the sky, the water, the shores."

This sense of communion is the most distinguishing characteristic of The Singing Wilderness, and marks the fulfillment of the land aesthetic. Olson described it best in his essay on "Silence," which, when he began working on the manuscript in 1952, he thought set the tone for the entire book. The essay is about the kind of deep communion that yields what Olson described as "flashes of insight." The three core paragraphs of the essay, which had their origins in a January 1930 journal entry, form the centerpiece of the book:

I once climbed a great ridge called Robinson Peak to watch the sunset and to get a view of the lakes and rivers below, the rugged hills and valleys of the Quetico-Superior. When I reached the bald knob of the peak the sun was just above the horizon, a flaming ball ready to drop into the dusk below. Far beneath me on a point of pines reaching into the lake was the white inverted V of my tent. It looked very tiny down there where it was almost night.

As I watched and listened, I became conscious of the slow, steady hum of millions of insects and through it the calling of the whitethroats and the violin notes of the hermit thrushes. But it all seemed very vague from that height and very far away, and gradually they merged one with another, blending in a great enveloping softness of sound no ouder, it seemed, than my breathing.

The sun was trembling now on the edge of the ridge. It was alive, almost fluid and pulsating, and as I watched it sink I though that I could feel the earth turning from it, actually feel its rotation. Over all was the silence of the wilderness, that sense of oneness which comes only when there are no distracting sights or sounds, when we listen with inward ears and see with inward eyes, when we feel and are aware with our entire beings rather than our senses. I thought as I sat there of the ancient admonition, "Be still and know that I am God," and knew that without stillness there can be no knowing, without divorcement from outside influences man cannot know what spirit means.

This passage demonstrates how Olson's land aesthetic is intimately connected to what Leopold called the "land ethic;" just as certain norms of behavior are required if patrons of an art museum are to have a full aesthetic experience, so are they required if "patrons"--the better word is "pilgrims"--of the wilderness are to achieve the complete land aesthetic experience of communion with the cosmos. Olson's purpose in The Singing Wilderness is not to define a proper land ethic, but he sometimes states clear preferences. Later in the essay on "Silence," for example, he writes, "At times on quiet waters one does not speak aloud but only in whispers, for then all noise is sacrilege."

The land aesthetic of The Singing Wilderness, however, does not always provide clear guidelines for behavior. In the essay "Forest Pool," for example, Olson traces the history of a pond from its wilderness origins through the dramatic changes wrought by humans over the course of several generations, without clearly indicating his approval or disapproval of the end result: the total destruction of the pool and its replacement by a field of corn. In his next book, Listening Point, Olson would spend more time examining behavioral issues, and would reach a more clear conclusion about the proper relationship between the civilized and non-civilized worlds, between culture and wilderness.

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