By Maria Popova

The point, of course, is to see the whole — what Virginia Woolf called “the thing itself.” Not just to uncover the fragments and discover how each works but to understand their harmonic unity — the sum that, as the forgotten genius Willard Gibbs knew, “is simpler than its parts,” simpler and more beautiful, the way myriad complex chords played by a vast orchestra of disparate instruments become a symphony — a single unit of transcendence.

The philosopher, naturalist, and pioneering conservationist Aldo Leopold (January 11, 1887–April 21, 1948) takes up this question in a wonderful essay about the Rio Gavilan — a vast watershed in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental, where Leopold had spent time with his son in the 1930s and where his conservation philosophy had begun to ripen — later included in the indispensable collection A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There (public library), published months after his death.

Aldo Leopold (Photograph: National Portrait Gallery / Aldo Leopold Foundation)

Leopold writes:

The song of a river ordinarily means the tune that waters play on rock, root, and rapid.

The Rio Gavilan has such a song. It is a pleasant music, bespeaking dancing riffles and fat rainbows laired under mossy roots of sycamore, oak, and pine. It is also useful, for the tinkle of waters so fills the narrow canyon that deer and turkey, coming down out of the hills to drink, hear no footfall of man or horse… This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers. Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it — a vast pulsing harmony — its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by Ruth Krauss.

Two generations after the German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the word ecology, two decades before the American marine biologist Rachel Carson made it a household word as she catalyzed the modern environmental movement, and an epoch before Robert Macfarlane, who carries the torch of Carson’s legacy, made his poignant case for why a river is alive, Leopold considers the shared metabolism underpinning the ecosystem of the river to make it a single living organism:

Food is the continuum in the Song of the Gavilan. I mean, of course, not only your food, but food for the oak which feeds the buck who feeds the cougar who dies under an oak and goes back into acorns for his erstwhile prey. This is one of many food cycles starting from and returning to oaks, for the oak also feeds the jay who feeds the goshawk who named your river, the bear whose grease made your gravy, the quail who taught you a lesson in botany, and the turkey who daily gives you the slip. And the common end of all is to help the headwater trickles of the Gavilan split one more grain of soil off the broad hulk of the Sierra Madre to make another oak.

At the dawn of the century of specialization, in which we butchered the continuum of reality into more and more discrete parts to be studied by narrower and narrower disciplines, with no dialogue between quantum mechanics and epigenetics, astrobiology and neuroscience, Leopold cautions against mistaking the instruments for the song:

There are men charged with the duty of examining the construction of the plants, animals, and soils which are the instruments of the great orchestra. These men are called professors. Each selects one instrument and spends his life taking it apart and describing its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called research. The place for dismemberment is called a university. A professor may pluck the strings of his own instrument, but never that of another, and if he listens for music he must never admit it to his fellows or to his students. For all are restrained by an ironbound taboo which decrees that the construction of instruments is the domain of science, while the detection of harmony is the domain of poets. Professors serve science and science serves progress. It serves progress so well that many of the more intricate instruments are stepped upon and broken in the rush to spread progress to all backward lands. One by one the parts are thus stricken from the song of songs. If the professor is able to classify each instrument before it is broken, he is well content.

While his contemporary Carl Rogers was mapping out the three elements of the good life from the perspective of psychology, Leopold considers the crux of the good life through a lens best described as ecomusicology:

Science contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world. Its great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view. This means doubting everything except facts; it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may. One of the facts hewn to by science is that every river needs more people, and all people need more inventions, and hence more science; the good life depends on the indefinite extension of this chain of logic. That the good life on any river may likewise depend on the perception of its music, and the preservation of some music to perceive, is a form of doubt not yet entertained by science.

Science has not yet arrived on the Gavilan, so the otter plays tag in its pools and riffles and chases the fat rainbow from under its mossy banks, with never a thought for the flood that one day will scour the bank into the Pacific, or for the sportsman who will one day dispute his title to the trout. Like the scientist, he has no doubts about his own design for living. He assumes that for him the Gavilan will sing forever.

Photograph: NASA / International Space Station

Couple with Annie Dillard on what a weasel knows about the secret of live, then revisit Walt Whitman on listening to the song of existence.

— Published December 3, 2025 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/12/03/aldo-leopold-river-science/ —

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