Ignorance is Bliss
“It might be wise to prohibit at once all teaching of real botany and real history, lest some future citizen suffer qualms about the floristic price of his good life.”
This particularly bitter sort of irony was inspired by some simple math: if 100,000 cars driving over the last remaining patch of blooming Silphium contain 25,000 people who have taken a botany class at some point in their life, he estimates less than a dozen people in those cars ever noticed the plant. And probably not a single person has ever noticed the unceasingly reduction in the amount. The point being that if people were really aware of the history and science behind those things they enjoy, they would probably no enjoy it nearly as much.
A Matter of Ethics
The opening paragraphs of the chapter “The Land Ethic” relate a story from Greek myth in which Odysseus hangs a dozen slave girls suspected of wrongdoing, noting that:
“The disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong.”
Out of context, of course, this cool assertion would seem unnecessarily cruel and heartless. Placed within the context of the author’s implication that abuse of the natural world and abuse of slaves are both matters of ethics and irony becomes not just obvious, but practical.
The Campbell Blue
At one point, the author share several stories about “cow-country” places on a map got their name. One of these locations came to be known The Campbell, deriving its name from the story of a bride who agreed to accompany her husband to the forsaken outpost only to decide once getting there that she wanted a Campbell piano. The struggle to get the piano to such a difficult destination was ironically undone when she very quickly realized she would still never be happy even with the instrument and thereupon left her husband behind.
Recreational Policies
The ironic impasse at the center of creating policies for recreational enjoyment of wilderness areas are noted by the author with no small amount of exasperation when he boils it down to the essentials:
“The Wilderness Society seeks to exclude roads from the hinterlands, and Chamber of Commerce to extend them, both in the name of recreation.”
His solution: to segregate the components characterizing each opposing interest and address them separately so as to eliminate the inherent ironic gap.
The Irony of the Naturalist
As with all books touting the majesty of the untamed wilderness, an overarching irony is pervasive throughout the book. Aldo Leopold joins the legions of writers who committed to publishing descriptions of the American wilderness which would by definition inspire readers to seek it out for themselves, thus ensuring that whatever becomes of that wilderness, it will never be the unspoiled version they also earnestly desire to preserve.
