...(Q)uit thinking about decent land-use as soley an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stabilty, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.  —Aldo Leopold, "The Land Ethic" from "A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There," 1949

Over the arc of more than a half century, Leopold's guidance rings as true as ever. The good news? We know how to make things right. The bad? We don't do it. Even worse, the exact wrong things are rewarded by farm subsidies, according to a gobsmacking new study, "Losing Ground," released by the Environmental Working Group (EWG). 

Over the last few years, food prices have soared to record levels, driven by an ever-increasing global demand and mandates for biofuels. Farmers are encouraged to plant "fence row to fence row," squeezing every last plant possible onto land now literally a fraction of its former self.

With less than 1% of the US population working on farms (~ 2% living on farms), most of us have no idea what goes on, much less how it directly affects us. EWG sent a film crew...

From the air, the damage to the skinned and gully-scarred land is obvious. Without buffers of grasses and trees to protect streams and rivers, soil—by the hundreds of tons—runs off the land, gone forever. Laced with pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, it pollutes the drinking water of cityfolk living downstream. And it triggers massive algal blooms that suck so much oxygen out the water, fish either sink or must swim away from these toxic hypoxic "dead zones."

"Losing Ground" focuses on Iowa, a mostly agricultural state, and on storm damage data. It shoots a hole through the "average soil loss" stats used by USDA, pointing out that this isn't the kind of damage that "averages." It's like tellilng someone who has had a hand amputated that on average he has  lost only a small percentage of his body. Yes, but...

The whole truth? Some areas are losing as much a 12 times the state average of ~ 5 tons per acre per year. A single storm can cause staggeringly severe erosion—now more of a concern than ever as scientists start to be able to link wacky weather with climate change.

Slowly, painfully and at great expense, most of the property damage from last week's massive three-day, 13-state, 243-tornado outbreak will be repaired. Homes will be rebuilt. Power lines replaced. New trees planted. But the biggest loss won't show up on any insurance claim. There isn't a slot for it. It is the land, washed away. Forever.

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HOW TO FIX IT: LESSONS OF THE PAST

By EWG's estimates, $51 billion is spent annually in the US on farm incentives to boost production, while $7 billion goes toward protecting soil and water. The result in Iowa: In a single year, 10 million acres lost "dangerous amounts of soil."

Yet "97% of soil loss is preventable by simple conservation means." In short, there's hope, but we've got to get cracking.

"Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time," a new documentary the conservationist's life and legacy, includes a section on the first watershed conservation project in the US, the restoration of Coon Valley, just north of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, in the 1930s. Leopold, a strong believer in community buy-in, helped develop a plan that involved 400 local farm families, assisted by "hundreds of young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps, and experts in agriculture, soil erosion, forestry, wildlife, and engineering." Today, Coon Valley is the very picture of the American rural ideal, an over-the-river-and-through-the-woods kind of place, with softly rolling hills, fertile fields and plenty of stream-protecting, wildlife-friendly habitat.

Leopold's own patch of Eden restored, made famous in "A Sand County Almanac," is now home to the 260+ acre Aldo Leopold Foundation. Just up the road from the International Crane Foundation and near the delightfully named town of Baraboo, Wisconsin, it is worth the trip, if only to see the forest of 60-foot pines, planted decades ago by Leopold's family during the Dust Bowl years.

Nina Bradley, Leopold's 90-something, cross country skiing-loving eldest daughter and the Foundation's emeritus conservationist, has kept records for decades, tracking over 300 data points about the land—everything from weather to plants to migrations.

We have compared out phenological data with my father's data and a third of the items are coming two to three weeks earlier than when Dad was here. We've been moving gradually toward climate change. Now, all of the sudden, we're seeing major changes.

— Nina Bradley, "Climate Wisconsin: Stories from a State of Change / Phenology" (video / article)

Will this rapid change finally be the "teachable moment" where conservation—and a land ethic—finally go mainstream?

There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot...

...Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamanic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture...

...In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conquerer of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for fellow-members and also respect for the community as such.

—Aldo Leopold, "A Sand County Almanac"

How better to celebrate Earth Day than to keep the earth from floating away?

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— J. A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews, Editor's Blog, @TrackerNews