One way to judge a people is to look at the ways they use nature—the land, broadly defined to include its soils, rocks, waters, plants, animals, and sustaining processes. A culture writes its name on land for all to see. Is the soil kept fertile and in place? Are waterways clean and full of life? Are tracts of land devoted to uses for which they are ecologically well suited? Are landscapes sensibly laid out and pleasing to the eye and ear? And are the modes of living and working on land likely to endure for centuries, without nature lashing...

The work of managing a natural area—a wildlife refuge, park, public forest, wilderness reserve—does not fit easily into American culture. When well done, the profession entails ways of thinking, valuing, and acting that stand culturally apart. It deviates from, and indeed calls into question, much of what America is about.

For starters, the work requires a long-term perspective. It means thinking about and planning for the very long run. This perspective contrasts with the short-term attitude that characterizes much of the modern age, whether it is the business that plans quarter to quarter, the student who looks ahead...

The conservation community in the United States suffered a loss in April 1948, when sixty-one-year-old Aldo Leopold died fighting a grass fire on a neighbor’s farm. It was a loss not just of a lead conservation voice but of a type of conservationist, one who could roll up his sleeves and labor on land yet who understood the broad cultural and economic contexts of land use and conservation. It was the latter skill that made Leopold so valuable, then and now. Even as he mastered scientific details, he developed a rare ability to distance himself from the day-to-day. He could...

It is early one morning, August 1864, in the mountains of western North Carolina. Ada Monroe has risen and sits on her house porch. The life she has known has wound down and come to a halt. Kinless and nearly friendless, alone and immobile, she has no idea what to do. The solace she gains from books and art is not enough to sustain her. Though Ada does not realize it, the next twenty-four hours will set her on a new course. She will begin life again, in a world badly torn by war. Her central possession is a three-hundred-acre...

To judge from its popularity, the journalistic convention of reporting two sides to every controversy reflects something like a deep-rooted yearning—certainly among Americans, perhaps among other peoples too—to reduce complex issues into opposing options. The world is hardly so simple, of course. Dichotomies are as apt to confuse as they are to clarify. Still, we routinely find ourselves confronted, for instance, with the options of vast reproductive autonomy for women or a fetus’s unlimited right to life: pro-choice or pro-life. Both sides ignore the complex social world in which abortion decisions are made. This tendency toward two-sided simplification...

To live well on land has long been a challenge and a hope for people everywhere. It is the “oldest task in human history,” Aldo Leopold claimed, and he was in a position to know as a careful student of the land and of the ways various peoples had misused it.¹ In America today, we are having trouble at that task, according to many conservationists. A major cause of our troubles has been the institution of private property rights in land. Too many landowners use their lands in ways that undercut the collective good, and their property rights shield them...

The institution of private property is one of the chief mechanisms through which a society interacts with the natural world. Property law creates a framework for managing and using nature. It explains who gets to do what, and where. When a landscape is divided into private parcels, it is not the land that is fragmented; nature remains an integrated whole. What is fragmented is the legal power to make decisions over land. The law prescribes how individuals can acquire managerial powers over particular segments of this natural whole.

One question that presses itself upon American law and culture today is...

One of Wendell Berry’s valuable contributions to conservation thought has been his persistent reminder that good land use rarely occurs in isolation. Good land use requires human users who care about land and know how to use it well. Sound knowledge is critical, and so is a supporting social order, a community that can inform and help sustain good practices. Such a community, in turn, requires leaders if it is to respond adequately to tensions and challenges. Not all local people but enough of them must display a commitment to the community and a willingness to serve. In Berry’s view...

The United States is currently seeking one or more national environmental leaders. Applications for the position are invited, especially from individuals, resident or nonresident, who have a capacity to stand back from U.S. culture and reflect critically upon it. Applicants will be screened based on their knowledge, character, and personal skills. No formal academic qualifications are required (but see below for our additional screening of applicants who have received PhD’s).

A national environmental leader must (1) help the people of the United States awaken to their environmental predicament, in its ecological and cultural complexity; (2) stimulate a yearning for better...

One lesson that stands out from the past few federal elections is that the land-conservation stance is due for an overhaul. Fifteen years ago, the first President Bush matter-of-factly declared himself an environmentalist. Today, few Republicans and a good many Democrats would accept the label only with qualifications, if at all. In the 2004 presidential election, John Kerry and other pro-environment candidates had little or nothing to say about the subject, presumably for fear that strong comments could cost votes. Few voters today treat the environment as a decisive issue. Something has happened.

Substantial credit for this anti-green shift goes...