THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



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world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is con- 

 venient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be 

 admired than it is to be used." Perhaps that "more" is 

 beyond what most people could or perhaps ought to be 

 convinced of. But without some realization that "this curi- 

 ous world" is at least beautiful as well as useful, "conser- 

 vation" is doomed. We must live for something besides 

 making a living. If we do not permit the earth to produce 

 beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food either. 

 Here practical considerations and those which are com- 

 monly called "moral," "aesthetic" and even "sentimen- 

 tal" join hands. Yet even the enlightened Department of 

 Agriculture is so far from being fully enlightened that it 

 encourages the farmer to forget that his land can ever pro- 

 duce anything except crops and is fanatical to the point of 

 advising him how to build fences so that a field may be 

 plowed to the last inch without leaving even that narrow 

 margin in which one of the wild flowers — many of which 

 agriculture has nearly rendered extinct — may continue to 

 remind him that the world is beautiful as well as useful. 

 And that brings us around. to another of Aldo Leopold's 

 seminal ideas: 



Conservation still proceeds at a snaiTs pace; . . . 

 the usual answer . . , is 'more conservation.' . .- , 

 But is it certain that only the volume of education 

 needs stepping up? Is something lacking in content as 

 well? . . . It is inconceivable to me that an ethical 

 relation to land can exist without love, respect and 

 admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. 

 By value, I of course mean something far broader 

 than mere economic value; I mean value in the phi- 

 losophical sense. 



