A Northwoods Almanac for 2/13-26/2026
Valentines Day – A Matter of the Heart
I typically write in this column entirely about the outer landscape – the stories of all the species that form this natural community we call the Northwoods. But actually I’m also writing about the inner landscape – yours and mine – which is the emotional landscape we employ to love this place and to work hard to protect it.
Examining one landscape without the other fails to fully describe what our common experiences actually amount to. And one without the other will also fail to ultimately conserve the Northwoods for all those to come.
Physicist Chet Raymo wrote, “Two things are required to truly see: knowledge and love. Without love, we don’t look. Without knowledge, we don’t know what it is we are seeing.”
Does one come before the other? John Burroughs, famous American naturalist, thought so: “Knowledge without love will not stick. But if love comes first, knowledge is sure to follow.”
I’m not sure of that order, or that it matters. We all have come to our love for the Northwoods via a thousand paths, whether from simply sitting on the end of a dock and watching the water, or deer hunting, or picking blueberries, or smelling a wild rose, or catching a fish, or watching a great blue heron take off. We each experience these differently, because we all experience the world in “our” way, the way we have come to filter the world and then interpret its myriad meanings. Thus, all places are inside our heads (and hearts), with our perceptions and beliefs filtering how and what we see.
In whatever manner we have come to realize our love of the North Country, stewardship is the translation of that love into action, the translation of our personal sense of place into the way we enact our lives.
Kathleen Dean Moore writes, “Loving isn’t just a way of being, it’s a way of acting in the world. Love isn’t a sort of bliss, it’s a kind of work.”
What should that loving work look like? That’s for each of us to decide. Whatever it may be, it hopefully will be expressed through ethical actions based in love. Leopold wrote, “It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land.”
I’ve always believed that if we can fall more deeply in love with the world, we will treat all beings with greater empathy and thus with greater respect, enabling each of us in our own way to best steward our part of the Northwoods.
What is an Education of the Heart?
How can we fall more deeply in love with the natural world? Here are what I see as the elements of an education of the heart:
1 - To become receptive, to pay attention
Begin with awareness, give things the dignity of their names, and then inquire into their lives, their stories. To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. - Mary Oliver
2 - To get past the charismatic, to look small
It’s easy to be in awe of the magnificent, but much harder to find the magic in smaller things. We’re always seeking big peak experiences - the Grand Canyon, for instance - when we could be daily gathering the small peaks - perhaps a beautiful stone on Lake Superior’s shoreline. Every single species challenges us with nearly all the mysteries of life. The trick is to have the center of the world be anywhere, wherever we go, wherever we are. Kathleen Dean Mooresays, Wisdom grows as a river grows, from the accumulation of many small things.
3 - To be mindful
This is the quality and power of mind that is deeply aware of what’s happening without commentary and without interference. This is how we become receivers rather than broadcasters.
4 - To become connected/to build relationships
How deep we feel we are a part of our communities - human and nature - is in direct proportion to how many of its members we truly know and appreciate. E.O.Wilson wrote, The more we know of other forms of life, the more we enjoy and respect others . . . Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.
5 - To become compassionate
The Dalai Lama says that real change is in the heart, that the problems of the world are at the emotional level. The solution? To develop compassion for all life without exception. We have to feel for all life, everywhere.
6 - To feel reverence
Reverence is contact with the essence of each thing and person and plant and bird and animal, wrote Gary Zukav. We have to see the world as something far more valuable than resources. How does one love a resource? Love is never a taking.
7 - To feel gratitude
To recognize how much we have been given, for the gift of life itself, and to then choose to speak on behalf of the larger whole.
8 - To see beauty
I heard of a boy once who was brought up an atheist. He changed his mind when he saw that there were a hundred-odd species of warbler, each bedecked like a rainbow, and each performing yearly sundry thousands of miles of migration about which scientists wrote wisely but did not understand. No fortuitous concourse of elements working blindly through any number of millions of years could quite account for why warblers are so beautiful. – Aldo Leopold
9 - To become ecologically literate
Conservation requires a broad literacy. Science must inform the discussion and the decision. We must be able to read the landscape and to think complexly. By making the landscape visible, then bringing it into focus, then bringing it to life, we then make it part of our life. We only grieve for what we know. – Aldo Leopold
10 - To find a balance between head and heart - to find wisdom
Decisions are made from a mix of thought and feeling, data and values, rational argument, and intuition. Loving a place is a process of learning to see, of transforming disconnected images into vision so we are no longer lost in our own neighborhood.
Great Backyard Bird Count - This Weekend!
The annual Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) takes place starting today, Friday, February 13 through Monday, February 16. The GBBC represents a chance to take a 4-day snapshot of bird populations around the world, creating the largest instantaneous snapshot of global bird populations ever recorded.
Participants are asked to count birds for as little as 15 minutes (or as long as they wish) on one or more days of the four-day event, and then report their sightings online at birdcount.org.
Anyone can take part in the count, from beginning bird watchers to experts, and you can participate from your backyard, or anywhere in the world.
Each checklist submitted during the GBBC helps researchers at Audubon, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and Birds Canada learn more about how birds are doing, and how to protect them. In 2024, more than 600,000 participants worldwide submitted their bird observations online, and identified 7,920 species, which is absolutely remarkable.
Please visit the official website at birdcount.org for more information and for the protocol on how best to count your birds.
Progress in Renewables!
From Katherine Hayhoe’s excellent Substack, Talking Climate. “Renewables, including solar, onshore wind, and battery storage have reached a price point where they are virtually unstoppable. Wind and solar alone are projected to account for 32% of global power by 2030, surging to over half of the world’s electricity by 2040.”
"What about the United States, you may be thinking? Well, despite the current US administration’s active opposition to clean energy which is stalling hundreds of new wind and energy projects, EIA data is still forecasting that renewable energy will supply 99 percent of new US generating capacity this year. Last year, together wind and solar produced 28% of US electricity, more than coal.
"Meanwhile in the UK, where coal was phased out entirely in 2024, renewables supplied 47% of all electricity last year. And Australia hit a new milestone in the last quarter of 2025, with renewables making up a full half of the national grid’s power mix."
Celestial Events
As of 2/15, our days are now growing longer by more than 3 minutes per day.
The new moon occurs on 2/17.
The 64th anniversary of John Glenn’s space mission as the first American to orbit the Earth takes place on 2/20. I was 10 years old, and I remember watching it in 1962 on our little black-and-white TV. He was a hero.
Thought for the week
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way . . . As a man is, so he sees.” – William Blake
