Essays to My Daughter on Our Relationship With the Natural World

Steven Simpson

Description

What do fishing with an otter, sitting atop a mountain at dawn with eighty Taiwanese backpackers, and driving home from Aldo Leopold’s Shack have to say about the evolution of a personal environmental philosophy? Essays to My Daughter on Our Relationship With the Natural World provides a series of reflections by an environmental educator about lessons learned from time spent in nature. Originally conceived as personal letters to the author’s daughter, this collection presents ethical questions outdoor enthusiasts regularly face as they work and play in the natural world.

The essays in this book explore environmentalism in a modern-day context, with topics including sustainability education, the current relevance of environmental writers from the past, and the uncertainty of what is meant by words like “naturalist,” “solitude,” and “wilderness.” There is no attempt to direct readers to any particular environmental philosophy. Instead, Simpson encourages readers to articulate their own perspective based on personal experiences in nature. Though Essays to My Daughter is written by a father to his daughter, the insights within the volume—and the questions they provoke—are valuable to all members of the next generation as they grapple with their own relationship to the natural world.

Preface

Introduction: Personal Philosophy and Individual Experiences

Part I: The Pond and the Shack

1 The Good Oak Redux

2 Drowning Out All Our Muskrats

3 Wild Apples

4 Still Fishing

5 A Person’s Leisure Time

6 Book Purge

Part II: Sketches Here and There

7 Wisconsin East: A Small Square of Red

8 California With a Touch of Maine: Tide Pools East and West

9 Minnesota: Night of the Quintze

10 Iowa: The Birds of Iowa

11 Taiwan: Ascent of Jade Mountain

12 A Return to Taiwan: Old and American

13 Ontario: Goodbye, Deadbroke Island

14 Wisconsin West: Mark Twain on the Mekong

15 Wisconsin West: What About the Other Kids?

16 Three Outsdoorsmen and a Philosopher

Part III: Continuums

17 The Preservationist and the Conservationist

18 The Wanderer and the Adventurer

19 The Homecomer and the Sojourner

20 The Romantic and the Scientist

21 The Restorer

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Author

Sujets

• Essays
• Sciences et techniques
• A Sand County Almanac
• Aldo Leopold
• Nature

Informations

• Publié par: Purdue University Press
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612497846
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

Essays to My Daughter is a well-written and thoughtful collection of reflections. It will be assigned reading in my classes, but more importantly, it will be the gift I ll send to friends and colleagues. Steven Simpson helps us understand why we care about the natural world.
-DAN GARVEY, PROFESSOR AND PRESIDENT EMERITUS, PRESCOTT COLLEGE
Such great writing and spirit! In Essays to My Daughter on Our Relationship With the Natural World , Steven Simpson smoothly transitions from commonplace occurrences in nature to thoughtful insights about humankind s relationship with the natural world. This is outstanding nature writing. Many of us in Taiwan have enjoyed Simpson s nature writing for decades. Through the conversation with his daughter, he has inspired me to think about experiences in nature more deeply and to pass them down to the next generation.
-HUEI-MIN TSAI, PROFESSOR, GRADUATE INSTITUTE OF ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION, NATIONAL TAIWAN NORMAL UNIVERSITY
Once again, Steve Simpson shows his remarkable capacity to take a philosopher s complex conceptual work-he did as much with Lao Tzu and John Dewey in earlier books-and explain it in rich and uncomplicated language. Essays to My Daughter on Our Relationship With the Natural World will be at home on college reading lists and on the coffee tables of those interested in more deeply exploring their relationships with the places and ecosystems they inhabit.
-SIMON BEAMES, PROFESSOR, THE NORWEGIAN SCHOOL OF SPORT SCIENCES
Like a conversation with a friend, Essays to My Daughter is about the formation of an environmental philosophy. Simpson intimately combines his personal experiences with classic nature writing from the likes of Leopold, Thoreau, and Cather. Through one man s wisdom shared with his daughter, this collection has lessons for all future generations as they explore and develop their own relationship with nature.
-LEO MCAVOY, PROFESSOR EMERITUS, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
ESSAYS TO MY DAUGHTER
Other Books by Steven Simpson
T HE L EADER W HO I S H ARDLY K NOWN The Art of Self-Less Teaching in the Chinese Tradition
T HE P ROCESSING P INNACLE An Educator s Guide to Better Processing (with Dan Miller and Buzz Bocher)
T HE C HIJI G UIDEBOOK A Collection of Experiential Activities and Ideas for Using Chiji Cards (with Chris Cavert)
R EDISCOVERING D EWEY A Reflection on Independent Thinking
ESSAYS TO MY DAUGHTER
on Our Relationship With the Natural World
STEVEN SIMPSON
Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana
Copyright 2023 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.
978-1-61249-783-9 (paperback)
978-1-61249-784-6 (epub)
978-1-61249-785-3 (epdf)
The cover photo was taken from the dock of my cousin Tom McEwen s small lakeside resort in Hazelhurst, Wisconsin. Tom and I fished together as kids, and my family stayed at his resort when Clare was growing up. Clare learned to ride a bike there. Tom died only months before this book was published. The book s content is dedicated to Clare and her mom; the cover is for my cousin.
To Clare and Manyu
Contents

Preface
Introduction: Personal Philosophy and Individual Experiences
Part I: The Pond and the Shack
1 The Good Oak Redux
2 Drowning Out All Our Muskrats
3 Wild Apples
4 Still Fishing
5 A Person s Leisure Time
6 Book Purge
Part II: Sketches Here and There
7 Wisconsin East: A Small Square of Red
8 California With a Touch of Maine: Tide Pools East and West
9 Minnesota: Night of the Quintze
10 Iowa: The Birds of Iowa
11 Taiwan: Ascent of Jade Mountain
12 A Return to Taiwan: Old and American
13 Ontario: Goodbye, Deadbroke Island
14 Wisconsin West: Mark Twain on the Mekong
15 Wisconsin West: What About the Other Kids?
16 Three Outsdoorsmen and a Philosopher
Part III: Continuums
17 The Preservationist and the Conservationist
18 The Wanderer and the Adventurer
19 The Homecomer and the Sojourner
20 The Romantic and the Scientist
21 The Restorer
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
Preface

MY DAUGHTER, CLARE, WAS ASKED TO READ ONE NONFICTION BOOK over the summer before starting her junior year of high school. The list of approved books included A Sand County Almanac . When she asked for my recommendation as to which book to read, I was sitting at a table near my bookcase. I didn t even have to get out of my chair to pull a copy of Sand County off the shelf. I told her I first read Aldo Leopold s environmental classic 1 when I was just a few years older than her and would be interested in her opinion.
Clare read the book and then told me it didn t offer much that was new to her. Dad, she said, I already know that it is stupid to shoot wolves just to have more deer. I already look up in the sky when geese fly over.
My daughter may not have been the best person to ask whether A Sand County Almanac had anything to offer her generation. Maybe the reason for her tepid review really was because the book was beginning to show its age, but more likely it was because I d been passing off Leopoldian ideas as my own for so long that Clare had already been exposed to much of what was in the book.
My own introduction to A Sand County Almanac came in college. My bachelor s degree is from the University of Wisconsin, the same school where Aldo Leopold taught and established the country s first game management program. 2 Leopold had been dead for twenty-five years when I showed up; still, his presence permeated the College of Agriculture side of campus. By the end of my sophomore year, I d been assigned A Sand County Almanac as a reading in three different courses-a wildlife ecology course, an outdoor recreation course, and a landscape architecture course. If Wallace Stegner was correct in describing A Sand County Almanac as almost a holy book in conservation circles, I was on my way to becoming one of its disciples. 3 Even a clueless undergraduate in search of a major takes notice when the same book is required reading in multiple courses.
I still have the paperback copy of A Sand County Almanac from my undergraduate years. 4 The paper quality is barely better than newsprint. The pages now crumble if not handled carefully. I keep the book not out of nostalgia, but because there are forty-eight years of notes in the margins. If I discarded the book now, I would lose the most complete record of my personal environmental thinking.
Clare s reaction to A Sand County Almanac made me wonder whether my environmentalism was as stuck in the 1970s as my taste in music: Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, Van Morrison, Aldo Leopold. Philosopher Kenn Maly once described A Sand County Almanac as the story of one man s transformation from traditional conservationist to biocentric preservationist. 5 If this interpretation is correct, a failure to progress beyond the insights of A Sand County Almanac might be missing the point. Environmental philosophies are supposed to evolve. They change. What if the land ethic as described in A Sand County Almanac was the culminating philosophy for Aldo Leopold, but meant to be a starting point for the rest of us?
To some extent, Essays to My Daughter on Our Relationship with the Natural World is a progress report on my philosophical growth since the first time I read A Sand County Almanac , but that is neither my motivation for the book nor its purpose. It began as a series of letters to Clare. She was about to head off for college, and our regular hikes and paddles together were about to come to an end. I envisioned a letter-writing campaign where I could periodically remind Clare of the role of nature in her life. It seemed to me a good idea at the time, but for two reasons, the letters never got sent. First of all, I had no reason to worry about my daughter. After she left for college, our telephone conversations often revolved around the new outdoor experiences she was having. Clare s connection to nature was firmly in place, and on matters of nature and the environment, she was more than capable of maintaining a connection on her own.
Secondly, the letters became more than simple reminders to my daughter. As often happens when someone takes the time to seriously write about an important subject, the content went off in unexpected directions. I intended to do no more than tell Clare to stay connected to the natural world, but I quickly found myself reflecting on how I d introduced her to nature in the first place. The results, which I hope still maintain the intimacy of a conversation between a man and his daughter, touch on topics I believe will be of interest to a broader audience than just Clare. Stephen King once wrote that all of his books start out as letters to one person (in his case, to his wife, Tabitha), 6 and the same thing more or less happened here.
If you are an outdoorsperson who picked up this book, you probably are someone who already has a sense of his or her environmental ethic. If you are a parent who picked up this book, you likely are a mom or dad who already takes kids outdoors. In other words, you don t need an introductory lesson on humankind s relationship with the natural world. Still, I ask you to give the book a chance. It is a conscious effort to make informal environmental education and basic environmental philosophy accessible, pertinent, and personal without dumbing it down. 7
Introduction
Personal Philosophy and Individual Experiences

IN A SEGMENT OF THE SHORT DOCUMENTARY A PRIVATE UNIVERSE , 1 Heather, a bright middle school student, is unable to explain how the earth revolves around the sun. Even after studying basic astronomy in school, her sketch of the earth s path is incorrect. Basically she has the earth flying past the sun, then making U-turns in outer space to keep from leaving the solar system. The point of the video clip is that the girl s con