My sincere thanks to Chris and Steve for your kind words about my site.

Steve asks:
> My reading of Leopold indicates that he was flirting with Ouspensky and
> other vitalists while he was young, but gave it up. For example I find very
> little in SCA to indicate that Leopold held any mystical or metaphysical (in
> the sense of pantheism or such) beliefs at that stage of his life. Do you
> see otherwise? It's an interesting question because much of Leopold's
> writing, especially SCA, has been taken to be based on some sort of mystical
> connection to nature, but I see the exact opposite. I see SCA as the
> summation (at that time) of Leopold's thinking about evolution and ecology;
> very rational and very scientific however literary it may be. I'd be
> interested if you see it differently.

The best single sources of which I am aware is Roderick Nash "Aldo Leopold's
Intellectual Heritage" Callicott (ed.) Companion to a Sand County Almanac.

I cannot for the life of me remember where I read it (it could even be in
the Nash article but I don't think so) - and I don't have the time to take a
careful look at SCA right now, but I recall reading someone saying that
Leopold did in fact reference Ouspensky in SCA, but as "the philosopher."
Ouspensky, Nash points out, did explicitly write of the "mind of a
mountain."

Stephen Fox's history of conservation and John Muir's influence also has a
very interesting chapter at its end about the influence of this kind of
thinking on environmental thought.

I think Leopold came up against a common problem confronting those of us who
have some kind of vitalist,mystical/animist/call-it-what-you-will experience
and perception of nature - that the experience is not intellectual in the
western sense of the word and the kind of thinking modern philosophy and
science in particular takes as legitimate is exceptionally ill suited for
discussing these issues except dismissively or reductively.  So, in SCA he
tried to merge more "respectable" kinds of analysis while seeking to evoke
in the reader the kind of experience that underlay his own views.

I am guessing here of course, but my guess is based in part because of my
own experience.  Right after receiving my Ph.D. at Berkeley I dared a person
who claimed to practice this kind of knowledge to "show me some real magic"
because I was sure he couldn't and wanted to see how he got out of it.  That
night he destroyed my Western scientific worldview...  Not to say I regarded
it as useless, far from it, but that it was a lot more fragmentary than I
had ever really thought.  For years afterwards I sought ways of exploring
this kind of experience/reality via the approaches I had learned in the
social sciences, only to conclude, rightly or wrongly, that that goal was
akin to describing color to the color blind while being permitted to speak
only in terms of black, white, and shades of gray.

The essay I mentioned - Deep Ecology and Liberalism - is my best attempt (so
far at least) to take Western liberal thought as closely as I can to at
least taking seriously this kind of reality - thinking like a mountain.
Michael Polanyi's concepts of "tacit knowledge" and "indwelling" seem to me
useful in that regard, as does Hume and Smith's work with what they called
"sympathy" but which today we might more commonly term "empathy."

As to Chris's questions, yes - I really like Abram's The Spell of the
Sensuous although I think he has only shed light on a part of the problem of
Western and modern "colorblindness" (to refer to my analogy above).  But I
agree with him that reading, and the types of thought it encourages, is a
very different kind of awareness than that which accesses these other kinds
of experience.  But a shift so profound as Abram describes will likely be
very  multi-causal.

I am unacquainted with Peat's Blackfoot Physics.  But it sounds intriguing.
I take it you recommend it?

Gus diZerega
Dept. of Politics
Whitman College
Walla Walla, WA 99362