By David Horst sandhill7@gmail.com
The Fox Cities will host a premiere of a movie about a personal hero of mine.
March 3 at the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley’s Perry Hall, “Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time” will be presented to what is shaping up to be a full house.
The showing of the film about one of the fathers of the conservation movement and the founder of the national wilderness system follows premieres in California, Baraboo – the location of “The Shack,” Leopold’s treasured weekend getaway for his years as a professor at the University of Wisconsin – and the Milwaukee Public Museum.
I’m happy to reveal a glaring conflict of interest in my reporting about this movie. My day job includes staffing the Environmental Stewardship Fund at the Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region, a major sponsor of the premiere here. No apologies for that.
The movie is named for a seminal moment in Leopold’s evolving understanding of his relationship to the land and its other inhabitants.
He was eating lunch on a rimrock in a mountainous area in Arizona when his party encountered a small pack of wolves. They did what people commonly did in the early 20th century when they encountered a wolf – they sprayed the pack with gunfire. Here is how he describes what followed in the essay “Thinking Like a Mountain” in his incomparable work of nature writing, A Sand County Almanac.
“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”
That was Leopold’s personal realization of a land ethic, an understanding that we are part of the Earth community; it is not a commodity for us to control.
Buddy Huffaker, executive director of the Aldo Leopold Foundation in Baraboo, said his hope is that the 72-minute movie inspires local conservation movements and causes more people to read, or re-read, A Sand County Almanac.
“For those who are really familiar with Leopold, there’s probably not a lot of new gems in there,” Huffaker said of the biographical aspect of the movie. One new thing that surfaced during research for the film was documentation that Leopold really had shot a wolf some 40 years before he wrote the essay about it.
“While his life has been characterized in a scholarly way, it has never been examined and explored through film,” Huffaker said, a medium that perhaps makes him more accessible for young people.
We’re guided though the film by Prof. Curt Meine, author of a 530-page Leopold biography published in 1988. It is a worthy read.
Viewers follow Leopold’s influences from his birth in 1887 and childhood in the river town Burlington, Iowa, to his days as a young forester in New Mexico and his groundbreaking wildlife conservation teachings in Madison.
Leopold scholars, three of his children, authors and modern day leaders of conservation, such as International Crane Foundation co-founder George Archibald, lend their analysis.
Huffaker watched the film come together, but the first time he saw the completed work, he said, “it still took my breath away at moments.”
The unalterable conclusion is that, yes, there is a vital place for Leopold’s approach in our day. You can see it in the faces of school children watching the wonder of butterflies, and painfully know it in the latest news story of thrill killing of wild animals.
We need more of Leopold’s land ethic, a view based on “things natural, wild and free.”
* * *
Molly sympathies: My sincere thanks to the dozens of readers who responded to my column on the difficult decision to end the suffering of our 15-year-old dog, Molly. All offered support and most told touching stories of their own losses of faithful pets. Your kind words, letters, poems, tears and sympathies were much appreciated by Jean and me. To those who suggested getting another dog, we have had a wild yellow Lab named Houdini during Molly’s final years. He has shown signs of mourning, too.
* * *
To learn more about the movie and the local premiere, or to buy a DVD or an “event in a box” with posters and educational materials, go to www.aldoleopold.org/greenfire.
No comments:
Post a Comment