I cherish my tattered, mass-market paperback, pocketable edition of Aldo Leopold's great work of ecological ethics and aesthetics.
A Sand County Almanac found me in transition and a space of clearing out what was old and worn down to bring in what was new and whole. Esoteric and poetic at the same time that its immanent framework for environmental justice is practical and persuasive, Leopold's ideas helped propel a movement 75 years ago whose second order effects in the space of ethics for countless other fields are only now being uncovered.
As a technologist, it made the most sense and no sense at all to make his ideas the foundation for my own.
Technology stands opposed to nature.
It always has. The earliest forms of devices we use today, the "extensions of the self" they make themselves out to be, were made to conquer creation. As Leopold muses,
"When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: he could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker: he could chop it down."
In this way, the journey technology has taken, its effects and implications, strictures and structures, can only be understood in the language of the natural world.
Leopold is most concerned with the effects of human interference in nature, upon which is laid the allegation of "violence" done through even the smallest act of changing natural environments. Using an analogy to electrical systems, he lays out this framing for an ecological paradigm:
"(1) That land is not merely soil.
(2) That the native plants and animals kept the energy circuit open; others may or may not.
(3) That man-made changes are of a different order than evolutionary changes, and have effects more comprehensive than is intended or foreseen."
In this language, we can assume the same things of an ecological paradigm of technology:
That technology is not merely hardware and software,
That flourishing occurs when human faculties remain unperturbed, but intrusive technology in our environment forestalls this growth,
That technological effects are (in Postman's language) neither additive nor subtractive but ecological in nature, and range in the scale of their impacts.
With this language in hand, a Leopoldian ethos shapes each stroke of the pen and press of the key on my site. And nowhere is that more true than in The Clearing Practice.
The creation of a a new home for my writing brought new opportunities. The digital health reflections and digital practice builders I'd dreamed of building were complete, but one idea kept its hold on me.
Not everyone has read A Sand County Almanac (or Amusing Ourselves to Death or The Shallows or The Technological Society or Technics and Civilization for that matter). These days, few users of technology are confronted with the effects of and shown life in the spaces outside their 6.5 inch world.
The inspiration and vision I felt and saw when I first met Aldo Leopold had to be transferable. If not through words on a page, then maybe through spaces to reclaim and amounts of time to witness accumulate.
The translation of my vision to visuals and language to the user experience of the tool remains imperfect, but the practical nature of the thing remains.
In the Practices section of my site, find The Clearing. Enter your daily screentime from your smartphone (an incriminating practice for many, but one that shouldn't be) or adjust based on your habits across devices. The tool reveals your available hours per year and, hopefully with what is perceived as a grace-filled, invitational posture, allows you to see how that amount could be spent across life-giving activities like writing letters, hiking, gardening, reading, and spending time in the embodied presence of other people.
Some of the things we may choose to engage in may seem like mere trifles, hobbies for the leisure-time of the privileged. Things that the educated and well-off enough to create time well spent in their non-working hours can do while the rest of the world cannot.
The worthless screentime and value generated only for silicon valley by users rich and poor would indicate otherwise.
No. To clear out those regions colonizing our time is to stake claim over something all people who have found themselves beholden to oppressive masters have fought hard to find before: dignity, agency, and worth. As Leopold encourages those wary of finding life outside the economic engines of society,
"A hobby (or any activity done for the sake of itself) is a defiance of the contemporary. It is an assertion of those permanent values which the momentary eddies of social evolution have contravened or overlooked..."
~ Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
Those permanent values of human flourishing are on offer to everyone. It may just take a clearing out of what's been in the way...