Dark Winter Night, Midsummer Dawn: Sand County Schedules—in Nature copertina

Dark Winter Night, Midsummer Dawn: Sand County Schedules—in Nature

Dark Winter Night, Midsummer Dawn: Sand County Schedules—in Nature

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 Welcome to The Nature and Science of Work podcast. I’m Robert Levin. Thank you for joining us!In this podcast, we dig deeper from our recent inaugural piece, in our “Nature Guides Work” series, on “Schedules and Scheduling in Nature,” by exploring the perspectives of Aldo Leopold, on that topic, in his writings.In the first half of the twentieth century, Aldo Leopold was a pioneering forester, fire fighter, conservationist, and ecologist, a pragmatist, and a professor—terms that don’t often go together. His writings on these topics came together in the form of A Sand County Almanac, in its time a classic of a conservation ethic, and later considered a founding statement of environmentalism. But Aldo Leopold predated that movement—the word doesn’t appear in A Sand County Almanac.What does appear is beautiful writing about nature, and how it works, written from the perspective of time spent, during the Great Depression, on an abandoned farm with poor soil, “a sand farm,” in a poor county in Wisconsin, a “sand county,” but with a rich life of nature for someone who understood how nature works.Here are three selections from A Sand County Almanac. Each about the work of birds and their schedules—and much more.The first, selected from an entry titled, “July: Great Possessions,” describes among the birds on the sand county farm, an entire intricate schedule of work and song at daybreak, of what we would now call an ecosystem, or here, an ergosystem, and its broader effects.The second selection, from the beginning of the entry titled, “March: The Geese Return,” describes a more singular worker and schedule—a lone goose flying into the narrow seam between winter and spring, through the snows of Wisconsin, executing high-risk operations strategy known as “minimizing time to completion,” in the dead of night, starting in the dead of winter. Is Leopold’s reference to a prophet and bridges a reference to his own work career, going from forester, to lab administrator, to a professor of game management at a prestigious university that may not have liked game management? Possibly.The last passage is also about geese—but only in part. It immediately follows the passage about the lone goose. It hints at who in that passage may have been the prophet who has burned his bridges. Aldo Leopold started his career as a firefighter and forester in the early United States Forest Service. He left the Southwestern US behind to become associate director of a US Department of Agriculture forest products lab in the more rarified university city of Madison, Wisconsin. He then crossed a bridge, accepting an appointment onto the university faculty.This passage, and others in A Sand County Almanac, provides more than a hint of conflict between Aldo Leopold’s love of nature, practicality, and pragmatism and the “refined” academic community around him. Some of whom, one can imagine from this passage, may have found it an affront that a “Professor of Game Management”—the first in the United States—was in their exalted midst, let alone one of the belief that knowledge of his subject could be valuable to such highly educated people.Three passages from A Sand County Almanac. Three examples of how Aldo Leopold found schedules and the work of nature in the world of nature around him in the Sand County place he liked to call home. * * *Acknowledgements: The three selections are excerpts from copyrighted material in A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There, by Aldo Leopold, originally published in 1940 by the Oxford University Press. A current edition is published by the Library of America. The brief excerpts used are connected to original commentary and criticism in this Nature and Science of Work podcast.The bird sounds and songs accompanying the excerpt from “Great Possessions” were recorded for The Nature and Science of Work in May, 2023, at Lincoln Farms Road, Maine. * * *For The Nature and Science of Work podcast—and the “Nature Guides Work” project, I’m Robert Levin.Keep seeing nature in work and work in nature.Thank you for listening! * * *Listen to All the Podcasts—on Apple Podcasts!You can listen to, follow, and share every The Nature and Science of Work podcast—in The Nature and Science of Work archive; on the Substack app; and on Apple Podcasts and your other favorite podcast providers!* Listen on Apple Podcasts* Listen on Google Podcasts* Listen on Amazon Music Podcasts* Listen on Spotify* Listen on Stitcher* Listen on Pocket CastsRead All the Newsletters!If you liked this “Nature Guides Work,” you’ll want to read and subscribe to The Nature and Science of Work newsletters. Each edition brings unique, refreshing, useful perspectives, on the world of your daily work and on the worlds of work around us in nature. Unique—you’ll find these perspectives nowhere else.Subscribe to The Nature and Science of Work: Read and Listen to All the ...
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