Welcome to the Nature and Science of Work podcast. This is a podcast in our “Nature Guides Work” series. Thank you for joining us!

Is this podcast, we again join Aldo Leopold, and his explorations of work in nature, this time a remote and ancient mountain river, and what its work and workers mean to all of us. And singer-songwriter, and “Nature Guides Work” contributor, Tom Sebok, has created an original contribution, pairing natural river sounds from the western US with his own musical interpretation of Aldo Leopold’s prose song.

In our first “Nature Guides Work” podcast we visited Leopold, a noted 20th century conservationist, researcher, and author of the classic A Sand County Almanac, at his refuge, The Shack, in a poor sand county in Wisconsin.

There he observed nature working around him: flights of geese into a frozen lake; calling of summer birds on their workday schedules.

Into his observations he wove acid and accurate comments on those he lived around and worked with at a prominent university.

Here we bring together three interpretations, through another passage of Leopold’s, of a wilderness river in northern Mexico, the Gavilan.

Two interpretations are from the present. You’ll first hear an interpretation of the context producing this beautiful and arresting excerpt from Leopold’s chapter about the river.

And you’ll hear Tom Sebok’s musical interpretation, who brings his work as a musician, sound engineer, songwriter—and conflict resolution specialist. Tom recorded river sounds, in Garfield County in western Colorado in the US—the waters of the Roaring Fork and Colorado Rivers—then paired those with his musical interpretation, to create the original composition, “River Song.”

Aldo Leopold’s interpretation of the river Gavilan, from which I’ll read excerpts, draws on many times and places in his life. He takes his time on the wild Rio Gavilan, and see it through his time and work as an academic research scientist. He also draws a beautiful picture of the ancient human on the Gavilan before him and how they worked.

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Acknowledgements

In this podcast, you heard excerpts from “The River Gavilan,” in A Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold. Originally published in 1940 by Oxford University Press, available in a current edition by the Library of America.

And you have heard “River Song,” composed and recorded by Tom Sebok in 2023, together with Tom’s recording of sound from Colorado river waters.

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For the Nature and Science of Work podcast and the “Nature Guides Work” series—thank you for listening!

Keep seeing nature in work, and work in nature.