9 - True Fellowship

Summary

THE LOCAL GLOBE

Can there be a true communication between human and non-human nature? For as Archy the cockroach nervously puts it when he ‘repels an attack of whales’:

i hope i do

not meet any icebergs

how would one talk an iceberg out

of it

(Marquis 1996, 21–5; archyology, archy repels an attack of whales)

Both Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney understood mother earth to be dangerous, a ‘dark and bloody ground’. That expression, however, comes from Aldo Leopold's essays collected as A Sand County Almanac in 1949, nearly twenty years before Heaney's first anthology, Death of a Naturalist (1966). Heaney's opening poems enact the death of a naturalist enforced into his consciousness by twee local stories about nature proving comically horrific (the eponymous title poem); by childish disillusionment when everlastingly ripe fruit gives way to ‘canfuls smell[ing] of rot’ (Blackberry-Picking); or by the sadness of being taught that on ‘well-run farms pests have to be kept down’ (The Early Purges). But what Leopold had written came from within the American tradition brought to public attention a century earlier by Thoreau. There is in Leopold the same pride in his own particular plot, in this case, his farm; the same tendency to anthropomorphise plants and animals; and the same tendency to incorporate the sport of hunting within a ‘natural’ rural life (Ingold 2000, 57; Landry 2001). Heaney, for whom the pen replaced the paternal spade as the instrument of responding to the land, never developed the image of the gun as the influential equivalent or predecessor of the pen. And neither could he have written, as Leopold did later in the book, that the definition ‘of what is a conservationist … is written not with a pen, but with an axe’ (Leopold 1949, 68; SCA, November).

In this same paragraph Leopold defined a conservationist as ‘one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of the land’. He situated his writing, not as an abstract exercise conducted by academics, which he despised (Leopold 1949, 153; SCA, Chihuahua and Sonora), but as the true scholarship of implementing a philosophy of practical values upon nature. In the way that he arranged his essays there is less of the ongoing conflict of interests than there was for Thoreau.