a sand county almanac
Rumi said there are a thousand ways to go home, and I'd offer handful of books as viable paths.
The ecologist & philosopher Aldo Leopold's work stands as one such path down a way not many think to tread in our day and age of comfort entertainment & bingeable stories. The "geometric progression of an abundance of distractions" Leopold observed as a natural phenomenon happens to be a quietly prescient way of seeing our culture of information overload. Even amidst delicious Pulitzer finalists & quality Cannes films lies a tendency to move forward, faster, farther... when home always lies behind.
I don't know why Jenny Odell's endorsement of Leopold in her book, How To Do Nothing, stuck out so much to me or why I picked up a copy all those years ago, but I'm forever grateful for finding a home in this work that I can return to always & often.
From the book:
No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections and convictions…
The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education…
There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot…
This science of relationships is called ecology, but what we call it matters nothing. The question is, does the educated citizen know he is only a cog in an ecological mechanism…
