"Take Care of the Earth"

Stimulating the conversation about land health

By Steve Swenson

Perhaps the greatest barrier to conservation is a lack of plain language.

But when I asked my six-year-old son, “What does land health mean?” he responded,
“Take care of the earth”—and this was the first time I had mentioned those words to him. This simple term gets through like few others and conjures images in the minds of most people, particularly landowners. Even when the image is qualitative, like a clear running stream meandering through a lush forest, it creates a starting point for conversation.

Our hope is to begin a conversation that continues.

Land health is so compelling to us because the idea can be grasped quickly, and yet the concept is equally complex, spurring us to think about complicated ecological relationships, trends over time, adapting to change, and connecting land and ethics.

Land health is an expression that Leopold developed over the course of his lifetime. Aldo Leopold chose his words carefully, crafting metaphors that reached out to many different kinds of people. In his writing for a general audience, namely farmers, he described wildlife as a crop and related wildlife management to farming. Writing at a time when the nation was being shaped quickly by technological advances, he often wrote about land as a machine; one of his most evocative, widely quoted, and almost proverbial phrases is, “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

Ultimately, however, Leopold felt that the sum of an ecosystem’s living and nonliving components—including soils, waters, plants, animals, and people—was more complex than a crop or a machine. Leopold came to see land as a community, a system of interdependent parts that was not unlike an organism; Leopold saw a healthy land community as a model of vigorous self-renewal. Health became the key metaphor in Leopold’s writing.

In a 1944 report for a University of Wisconsin committee on postwar agricultural policies titled “Conservation: In Whole or In Part?” Leopold stated:

Conservation is a state of health in the land.

The land consists of soil, water, plants, and animals, but health is more than a sufficiency of these components. It is a state of vigorous self-renewal in each of them, and in all collectively. Such collective functioning of interdependent parts for the maintenance of the whole is characteristic of an organism. In this sense land is an organism, and conservation deals with its functional integrity, or health.

Deeper understanding and appreciation of land is the result of integrating more of the land’s complexity into our thought,language and planning—not reducing the environment to pieces and parts. Long term visions and plans for land need to take a holistic approach and reflect the whole system. With land health representing the “state of the system,” any number of components can be incorporated into a definition of land health; moreover, these components are not only environmental and ecological but also social and economic. Literally thousands of components can contribute to defining land health, or, for practicality, a few indicators that represent the critical parts of the system. Importantly, these specific elements, and their relations to one another, can help us conceptualize, communicate, and illustrate the idea of land health.

This holistic approach to defining land health compels us to consider both the big picture and the relationships among its parts. For example, an increase in exotic species generally creates a decrease in the number of native species that make upan ecological community. One might be busily planting native seed in order to keep natives in the ecosystem, while failing to recognize that a critical negative force reducing their diversity is exotic species. Disappearing natives are a symptom of invasive species; the cure is not planting more natives but reducing the exotics. Going further, if we recognize that controlling exotic species is expensive, prevention programs that detect the first arrivals of new exotic species could be identified as critically important when considering long-term land health. It is not just about the most important and valued components, such as native species diversity, but how the components relate to other parts of the system. Systems thinkers use the metaphor “seeing the forest and the trees”; defining and pursuing land health is about relating parts to each other while never losing sight of the big picture.

Land health can be easily compared to human health, as well. Both are defined not in “black and white” but in “shades of gray.” In human health, we consider a range of blood pressures, body types, cholesterol levels, or exercise regimes to be healthy. Land health, too, can be characterized in terms of ranges, but just as in caring for our bodies, our actions will tend to increase or decrease the health of the land. In human health, we consider a range of blood pressures, body types, cholesterol levels, or exercise regimes to be healthy. Land health, too, can be characterized in terms of ranges, but just as in human health, actions that we take will tend to increase or decrease the health of the land.

The concept of land health easily crosses geographic and ecological boundaries. Healthy land in the sand counties of Wisconsin will have different community members and relationships than healthy land in Chesapeake Bay, the Mississippi Delta, the Sangre de Cristos, or California’s Central Valley—and yet land health could be defined for each of these places. History tells us that land health is dependent on the degree and type of land use, but, we posit, not wholly determined by land use. In other words, humans have needs for food and fiber, and so we must ask, “What represents land health in an agricultural field or a woodland?”—as well as the state natural area or wildlife refuge nearby.

The word “health” expresses positive values and ethics. We are acting on our values when we see the health of our children as our responsibility and take action to feed, clothe, and provide shelter for them. Can you imagine a world where landowners know the health of their land and see improvements as their responsibility? Leopold certainly did; he called it a land ethic.
The Aldo Leopold Foundation is in the research and development phase with the land health concept. We have hired a land health intern who is working with foundation staff and senior fellows to compile a bibliography of books, journals, and articles in which authors have dealt with land health and similar concepts (parallels can be found among the literature about biodiversity, ecosystem health, and biotic integrity). The vast majority of the literature that recognizes land as influenced by social, economic and environmental forces is theoretical in nature. The more practical applications of the land health concept tend to focus on narrower yet still complex issues, such as defining health in terms of long-term resource productivity for rangeland and forest management, or in terms of stream health to support fisheries or to supply water for cities and irrigated farmland.

Leopold provides a critical perspective in the pursuit of land health. In “The Land Ethic,” the culminating essay of A Sand County Almanac, Leopold stated, “It of course goes without saying that economic feasibility limits the tether of what can or cannot be done for land. It always has and it always will. The fallacy the economic determinists have tied around our collective neck, and that we now need to cast off, is the belief that economic necessity determines all land-use… An innumerable host of actions and attitudes, comprising perhaps the bulk of land relations, is determined by the land-users’ tastes and predilections, rather than by his purse.”

Eventually, we will apply land health to our land stewardship planning in a broad sense, taking into account social and economic elements as well as environmental elements. Environmental factors are critical to land health, and yet economic needs, personality and family history, and local culture will figure in the decisions that landowners and communities make in tending to the health of the land.

Most immediately, we are developing a short paper on land health and its applications, which we will use to gather momentum for future partnerships, fundraising, and project planning, as well as to reach a general audience.

When you begin a conversation with someone, language in common is everything. When I asked my son for a definition of sustainability, biodiversity, and systems ecology, his response was “I don’t know.” The conversation ended. Our hope is to start a conversation that continues.

Land Health: Defining the Aldo Leopold Foundation’s Land Stewardship Goals

The Aldo Leopold Foundation continues to be a very active steward of our lands and to assist conservation partners and private landowners in the management of their lands. We coordinate a variety of activities including: returning fire and other natural processes; controlling the dominance of garlic mustard, buckthorn, and other exotic species; managing high impact wildlife species, such as deer; and directly restoring diversity of native plant species by planting prairies and through reforestation.

We are also seeking to better understand how we fit in the bigger picture of land health in the region. Through breeding bird surveys and our involvement in the
Leopold-Pine Island Important Bird Area, we are getting a much better picture of our land’s importance to bird species that require grasslands and wetland habitats. We are placing our management in the context of global issues, such as timber management for traditional conservation goals as well as carbon sequestration. We are also exploring ways to deepen the human-to-land relationship, through our intern program, landowner mentoring, and the Woodland School.

Our foundation’s growing capacity, proficiency, and experiences have pushed us to ask the next important question, “Where does the successful completion of these tasks get us?” In practicing land stewardship and developing a land ethic, we must ask ourselves, “What ‘end’ are we working toward?” We feel the answer is placing these tasks in the larger context of land health.

Land Health Intern Derek Schook contributed to this article. Derek is a recent graduate of The College of Wooster in Ohio. He has been assisting foundation staff and fellows in the development of land health as destination, perspective and language.

Aldo Leopold’s report “Conservation: In Whole or In Part?” can be found in the essay collection The River of the Mother of God, published by the University of Wisconsin Press, available from our bookstore.