What is your land ethic?
May 2026, 2nd year apprentice
Aldo Leopold, in his seminal essay, “The Land Ethic”, laid out that, “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” Leopold felt and communicated the profound depth at which that simple ethos registered in the United States of the 20th century. For people of European descent, especially those who had been raised in the domineering context of colonial projects outside of Europe, land ethic was a radical notion. It flew in the face of half a millennium of transplanting and propagating European strains of land use practices, domestic plants & animals, ways of generating knowledge and values, and spiritual underpinnings of the cosmos into new soils. Most of that process was driven not just by material imperatives of survival, but missionary zeal that the European way was inherently superior, and the process of replacing what preceded European dominion was benevolent and inevitable.
It was, to Leopold and his contemporaries, a radical declaration to say that there may be another paradigm, that maybe the colonizers were missing something essential. But the Land Ethic idea is better understood in a broader context. That imperative– considering the moral weight and agency of the more-than-human world–is, properly scaled in both time and place, far more common than the Earth-negating norms that shaped the path Aldo was walking.
As the descendant of European settler-colonizers, I walked in Aldo’s footsteps, learning through his Western lens how much of Creation had been left out of my world’s moral calculus. I also learned how this myopia was entwined with a long tradition of extirpating and erasing the countless other ways of knowing the land and being a good ‘land citizen,’ or indeed ‘land sibling,’ that were/are present in the place I call home. Aldo was not wrong in his assessment. But he was wrong in asserting that, “There is as yet no ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it.” His breakthrough was just a pinprick into the firmament of what spiritual, ethical, and practical understandings of land ethics our civilization has squandered, lost, forgotten, or ignored.
I benefit from Leopold’s insight, and from looking back to where he lacked it. His work prepared the ground for other ideas and beliefs, already in the seed bed, to come back into bloom after a period of dormancy. There is less diversity and richness of ecological knowledge, of reciprocities and relationships in our land-based livelihoods, than there were 300 years ago. This dearth parallels the decline in richness of species on the prairies of North America, soil organic content, healthy riparian areas and wetlands, the overall biomass productivity. But there is also preparation of ground for something better to follow.
Land stewards of my time and place have begun in earnest to incorporate Leopold’s lesson, and more importantly, the constellation of lessons that indigenous peoples have been steadily nurturing through unspeakable turmoil and hardship in the wake of colonization. We can name and practice the value of diversity, not just for the diets and performance of cattle, but for the living soil, the richness of life that surrounds us, and of ways of being human and cooperating with the land that sustains us. I am better off for knowing just a little of what the First Nations have been doing to steward the place I call home, and to give back when they received the land’s bounty. I will be even better off as I come to know a little more, and then a little more, and to share that knowledge, not only through my words and values, but through my actions and relationships.
As far as the land goes, can I humble myself to the point that I belong to it more than all of its wonders could ever belong to me? Can I leave things a little better than I found them–more resilient, more diverse, holding more water and nutrients, supporting more life? Am I engaged in the process of changing and growing along with the land? Am I listening? Am I giving back of myself and my gifts at least a little of what the land gives to me? I am, as we all are, a work in progress.
How did you get interested in agriculture? And what are you hoping to gain from your apprenticeship?
May 2025
I became truly interested in agriculture when I learned that humans can and do impact the rest of nature for the better. I remember fifteen years ago thinking to myself, “I should probably become a farmer.”
At the University of Montana, while studying Resource Conservation, I got an extra large serving of environmental doomerism. There were countless stories of the regrettable ways that human meddling, in all its sapience, led to noxious weeds, dust storms, plastic oceans, habitat loss, extinction, erosion, desertification, and on and on. The biggest and scariest of all was climate change. Mass extinction, migration, mega storms, the acid die-off of ocean photosynthesizers that fill our very lungs. All that dour data–all those stories–are still rattling around in the back of my mind, and sometimes too the forefront. Far too often, we do terribly by our more-than-human partners in the biosphere.
But I also learned about other more useful stories. Between backpacking the Bob Marshall, and surveying ancient larch stands with Ben Thompson, a Columbia Falls logger, I was absorbing how we cannot be separated from ‘nature’ in any sensible way. I read from David Abram about the wild birth of written language, and how that phenomenon has cast a formidable shadow over the animate, creative earth over the past few millennia. I read Gary Snyder’s ‘Song of the Taste.’ I read about Buffalo Bird Woman’s garden.
I learned about the livelihoods of Indigenous people throughout the globe, who practice stewardship of whole ecosystems that leads to mind-boggling abundance. I learned that those practices are the fruit of a more robust, ethical science than the one I’d been raised in. They weren’t inherently or mythically better, a pristine and primitive accident that ‘uncivilized’ minds were gifted by Providence. They are better in the sense that thousands of years of survival/livelihood driven trial and error lead to soil, water, plants, animals, and people all having much more opportunity to thrive. A few short centuries ago, the whole continent was rich with deep roots, the water table was higher, the fisheries and game herds were overflowing, hectare after hectare of Chestnut trees giving a family’s worth of calories away for free. And every place, be it mountain or hot spring or salt lick, had a story. I was also learning that those life-ways weren’t in the past (another flawed notion I’d been passively raised into) but with me in the here and now, embodied in practice, consecrated by ritual, spoken in countless languages, passed in berry-stained stories from mother to daughter today, and again tomorrow.
Some part of me knew for my whole adult life that I wanted to be part of building up soil, sowing new seeds. I was raised in a world of consumption, at the top of the pyramid of a global empire, disconnected from the ground that sustains me, the living cycles that housed, clothed, and fed me. In my life I have drifted closer and away from this understanding, this clarity of purpose. But now, in agriculture, I get to be a producer, a steward of growing things: where I was always meant to be.
Final Reflections
November 2025
A year is short enough in the life of a person. I’ve come close to completing my 36th circuit around the sun, and while I know that doesn’t make me old, per se, I’m not as young as I used to be. I’ve had some bumps and bruises and strained muscles this year, my first in agriculture. I’ve got more than a few gray hairs, crow’s feet furrowing deeper on my sun-burned face, and as I write this, an ice pack strapped to my lower back. Yet for all the wear and tear of my time with Indreland Ranch–body, mind, and soul, I’m the healthiest I’ve ever been.
More than once this season I’ve been asked how I found my way into a ranch apprenticeship. I’ve taken to saying that it was a long and winding path. Some days it seems like the blink of an eye since I was a junior at the University of Montana, interning as a Wilderness Ranger for the summer on the Powell Ranger District of the Selway-Bitterroot in North Central Idaho.
A few blinks later and my trail days had landed me behind a computer, working with a great group of people at Wild Montana to help protect the wide open public lands of Eastern Montana in my hometown of Billings. But for all the good that came of that opportunity, I was stressed, struggling with my mental and physical health, and feeling the lack of something I had when I lived in a tent for weeks on end, and earned every calorie of freeze-dried tortellini I ate.
A few blinks and a few years later and I felt like I’d had a fresh start. I quit drinking, started taking meds for depression and anxiety, and was twice promoted while working for the 2020 Census—to Field Manager for Group Quarters Enumeration over the entire state of Montana. By March of that year I’d hired and trained twenty Field Supervisors, and we were just about ready to start training a team of over 100 enumerators. Then Covid turned the world upside down. I stuck it out for a while, but still wasn’t able to cope with the stress of that role and that time. But I knew I wasn’t alone, and I had faith that something out there was right for me, that I had gifts to offer to the world, and that the broad experience of a somewhat soiled past might be the enriching fertilizer of a more focused tomorrow.
There were other jobs, more ups and downs, dark clouds and silver linings. I blinked again and found myself driving rural routes for a FedEx ground contractor. I was mostly behind a windshield, but feeling the tractor pull of gravel roads, wide open spaces, changing seasons, and the (mostly) friendly welcome of a coterie of ranch dogs and other barnyard critters. I’d heard about the New Agrarian Program from my friend Alexis Bonogofsky, and while it took yet another year to get up the gumption to apply, it didn’t take long to realize that I’d found some ground to take root in.
That long and winding path opened onto wide and welcoming plains, not far from home in Billings, just a few drainages up the Yellowstone. The plain pulsed with snowmelt from the Crazies and Absarokas. It wound through cattails and willows, under cottonwoods and junipers, to the songs of sandhill cranes and red-winged blackbirds. It fed acres of bromes, fescues, and wheatgrasses. It filled up with hail and rain and black angus, and emptied out with sun and wind and black angus. It witnessed my fleeting shadow, sometimes paired with an old Honda 4-wheeler, sometimes an old Toyota pick-up, or F-250 bale loader, or on foot, or tucked away in a fifth wheel camper under night-long thunderstorms. It saw me thread it with fiberglass posts and polywire, quilting together pastures, dragging mineral sleds, zig-zagging heifers back in their pens. It saw calves born in muddy, frigid May sleet, and in baking, dusty, high June sun. It saw new life burst forth in abundance. It saw death somberly levied. It was perfumed with sagebrush and wild bergamot, and sweetened with rosehip and chokecherry. It was sentried silently by golden eagles & Black bears, and heralded by the bugle of bull elk in rut, by the gleeful howls of coyotes.
I may have been scarred wrestling with barbed wire, soaked to the bone in hailstorms, swarmed by biting flies, stymied by stubborn livestock, and used all the way up time and again on this brief run of long days. But the feeling at the end of such days is what I need, what I’m finding out I’m made for. Like the river, I haven’t run dry. Here I am, about a year older, all the wiser for being a beginner, further along for being willing to start over.