The Green Magazine has once again taken over the pages of the Dartmouth Free Press, an infrequent ritual designed to bring a little-known but critical magazine into the Dartmouth limelight. In this issue, a former Green Magazine editor-in-chief discusses how she was converted from a debutante into a crunchy activist. Other Green Magazine contributors discuss their experiences on organic farms, and the fun they’ve had learning to ferment their own food. And while there are some articles in this issue that underscore the precarious state of the world, and the need for immediate, drastic changes to our lifestyles, the real point of this issue is that environmental living is fulfilling. The crunchy folk are doing what they love and living better than any I-banker ever could.

But what does it mean to be an environmentalist? Environmental movements have been around for a long time; but there’s an easy way to split them into two categories. There’s environmentalism prior to photos from outer space, and there’s environmentalism afterward. If there were a single person whose writing best conveys the environmentalism before that first overhead shot, perhaps it would be Aldo Leopold, whose book the Sand County Almanac, brimming with the majesty and beauty of the natural world, has become something of a bible to environmentalists, and land-lovers of all stripes.
But since that first photo, environmentalism is only half about loving the land. (Land does not mean dirt. The living land, which includes everything living that dwells in it.) Now, it’s also a recognition that we are all prisoners onboard a spaceship bound for nowhere—and so we’d better not screw it up.

Leopold is sometimes quoted as saying “The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.” For environmentalists nowadays, that has taken on new meaning, now that Humanity is a geological force. Our impact on the planet Earth is outmatched only by the plant precursors that oxygenated the atmosphere. We ape-ascendants look up at sunrise and sunset, day after day, from the bottom of our smallish gravity well, and as our technology increasingly and visibly gives us the power to alter and even design everything trapped in that well, our minds are changing. One by one it is dawning on us that we are all going to have to get together and figure out how this whole thing is going to work—which parts of the land we value, and which parts we’ll pave.

Tucked almost invisibly—but hardly innocuously—throughout Dartmouth campus and the world are clusters of people who’ve realized; people who know that environmentalism is the future of politics. Among them are the crunchy environmentalists; the people consciously exploring design options for how we’re all going to live at peace with each other, and with the ecosystems we depend on, inside the thin envelope of air between earth and space.

That’s what the Dartmouth Organic Farm, and the coming Dartmouth Sustainable Living Center are: groups of people working with a patch of land to find ways not to spoil it. They are looking for ways to do what must soon be expected of us all—to not have a despoiling existence.

Ultimately, environmentalism isn’t simply about rejecting material goods—I’m no stoic—it’s about seeing the value and interconnectedness of the life around us. Aldo Leopold put it this way, “The problem is how to bring about a striving for 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.”

There is no doubt in my mind that we do not yet have a solution to the problem of reminding people that they are connected to the land. I don’t even know if the problem isn’t steadily worsening—do you think any tribal person ever felt the need to “raise awareness” among his fellows about the land? Global climate change caused by CO2 is the best publicized of the myriad ways that homo sapiens sapiens are wounding the vitality of the world, and yet we allow CO2 emissions to climb higher. The simplest measure of humanity’s effect is the extinction rate, and at the moment we’re causing extinction at a faster rate than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. We don’t even seem upset by it. One of the hardest things about being an environmentalist is the recognition that our way of life is killing our planet, ourselves. Sometimes it’s easier not to think about it.

And the more you think about it, the more pervasive our problem is. As Aldo Leopold put it, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

A lot of people are fond of sharing doom and gloom stories about environmental collapse, and I share their concern. However, some days I can’t help but think that the best thing for the human race would be for something terrible to happen, to remind us all that we’re all stuck here together, and are going to have to learn to love—and respect—the land to which we belong. We’re all going to have to develop some goodwill for each other, and a willingness to be happy with what we have, not what we can get. Assuming we learn the lesson—and we must—it actually sounds like we could be headed for a wonderful future.

I’ll close with a favorite quote of mine, also by Aldo Leopold, about geese in North America.

“Every March since the Pleistocene, the geese have honked unity from Currituck to Labrador, Matamuskeet to Ungava, Horseshoe Lake to Hudson’s Bay, Avery Island to Baffin Land, Panhandle to Mackenzie, Sacramento to Yukon. By this international commerce of geese, the waste corn of Illinois is carried through the clouds to the Arctic tundras, there to combine with the waste sunlight of a nightless June to grow goslings for all the lands between. And in this annual barter of food for light, and winter warmth for summer solitude, the whole continent receives as net profit a wild poem dropped from the murky skies upon the muds of March.”