How to Know the Birds: No. 23, Parakeet Possessions

Aldo Leopold, the influential 20th-century ecologist, intended that his magnum opus be titled Great Possessions. Then marketing got involved. A Sand County Almanac has endured, and I can see why. Simple and descriptive vs. fraught and philosophical. The idea of possession has a long and troubling history in our Western culture, extending not only to persons and objects but also to an “Abrahamic concept of land” which the author vigorously decried. So I’m basically okay with marketing’s instinct on this one: Hook the buyer with easy words, with an unchallenging idea; then unleash upon the reader the full force of Leopold’s still-radical views on humanity’s place in nature.

One problem for us moderns is the whole conception of “Sand County,” far from the humdrum conformity of our homes and offices and other human constructs. You won’t find Sand County on any map of Wisconsin, for the simple reason that there is no such place. A Sand County Almanac is out there, away from it all, inaccessible to those without means of escape—and, more insidiously, to those who aren’t inclined to escape in the first place. There is, for the 21st-century reader, an undeniable whiff of privilege about the experiences and ambitions that informed Leopold’s great book.

Which is why places like Green-Wood Cemetery, right smack dab in the middle of Brooklyn, are critical to the shaping of a present-day environmental ethic.

Video by © Ted Floyd.

“I am the sole owner of all the acres I can walk over,” exults Leopold in the entry for the month of July in A Sand County Almanac. “It is not only boundaries that disappear” in places like Leopold’s rural Wisconsin getaway, “but also the thought of being bounded.” That is a powerful vision, and a provocative one, but I wonder if it doesn’t go far enough. Leopold is a “great landowner,” the birds and other animals his “tenants.”

It was different for me that sunny afternoon in the cemetery. Alongside the kestrels and parakeets, among the old beech trees and spreading oaks, immersed in a swarm of midges at an old frog pond, I and my human companions were participants in the grandest of dramas. For it is in this ancient space, sacred in its way, that boundaries disappear—between humans, as Leopold prophesied, but even between humans and non-human animals, in a manner Leopold never fully comprehended.