Land and water
together form a necessary matrix. Land and water
together form a necessary matrix.
"We all live downstream on round river."
Knowing that land, air and water are inherent and inseparable entities that make life possible is the initial step to becoming ecologically literate. They form the acronym: LAW, representing a universal quality of nature that restrains and creates opportunity for all living creatures.
Then realizing what experts,
like Aldo Leopold believe, is the secondary step to becoming ecologically literate. Understanding their meaning and symbolism can be another step toward developing an ecological imagination.
The importance of allegories and symbolism in nature writing is not to be overlooked. Leopold, in Thinking like a Mountain for instance, is using an analogy between what is seen and otherwise hidden from our view.
Professor Aldo Leopold inspecting a specimen.
A key reason
to employ symbols is to compare what is known to what is obscure, or even too
difficult to understand without an image to remind us of hidden "but significant;"
features. 
The
tree shown here in silhouette, also recalls a faint resemblance to how water
moves across the landscape to form rivers and their
tributaries.
In the picture below to the right the branching patterns are less pronounced, but none the less they can be seen as the impression of 
surface water as it moves across the dry land of western Kansas. Although these are two distinctly different images, they point to how water shapes the larger patterns around us. We can use those to understand how the not so obvious relation between one thing and another may perhaps be crucial to understanding a natural condition. For instance, in ecology, the smallest and most insignificant component of a process may be more crucial to the successful functioning of a plant, animal, or bacteria, than the larger, more obvious element in any transformation.
By analogy, the availability of water and carbon dioxide for plant growth in the presence of sunlight (solar radiation) is a large and important component to photosynthesis; that process in plants and bacteria that creates sugar and energy from sunlight, minerals, and carbon dioxide. But it may well be that a very tiny amount of calcium, potassium or magnesium–seemingly in an insignificant amount– has as much influence on the conversion of sun energy into matter as the shortage of water, or loss of soil moisture. Yet ample water supplies are essential for any living system to thrive.
Do compare your home to the post-war model home.
There is more to water than most people care to think.
"There is much confusion between..." land and country.
"Rio Gavilan" & "Round River"
A Sand County Almanac and
Round River both from Leopold's Journals, explore compatible but different themes.
While both the "Rio Gavilan" & "Round River" are rivers, one is literally and the other is figuratively connected to examine the coherence of nature in our lives.
"Rio Gavilan" is the river of the eagles, the fish they feed on and the numerous creatures from elk to beaver and meadow mouse to heron that come to the river's edge to gather their sustenance.
"song of the waters"
We are all "actors in an allegory"
"Every region has a human food symbolic of its fatness."
"Food is the continuum in the Song of the Gavilan."
"... instruments of the great orchestra."
(162)
"a river that flows into itself"
&
"Ecology is destined to become the lore of Round River"
A river in Virginia near Natural Bridge.
Rivers and the ecology of forests.
A necessary matrix, means that you cannot separate water from land.
| Land | Water | arid | wet |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mountains | tundra |
cloud forest |
|
| Plateaus | desert |
conifer forest |
|
| Plains | savannah |
marsh |
|
| Coasts | lagoons |
estuaries |
|
Conservation is ultimately, if not always, "the complexity of the land organism"
Levees along the Sacramento river, shown on the left at a moderate flood level, attests to the capacity and necessity of people to alter the flow and channel of rivers and thus change the landscape. Leopold always suggested that there had been far too much manipulation of natural systems for these ecological assets to yield a sustained bounty from the land and its tributaries. His essay on Round River is a testimony to his feelings and thoughts.
"We have radically modified the biotic stream; we had to."
(196)
Adam Rome, Bulldozer in the Countryside
Select a passage from
Leopold;
And consider what he says, for example, about leisure.
Adam Rome, Bulldozer in the Countryside
