What Is a Conservationist?
The author answers this question through metaphor. The imagery here perhaps somewhat ironically is dependent upon the swinging of a tool of destruction rather than conservation. But then that is the point of his metaphor”
“A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land.”
What Is Ecology?
Keeping in mind that this text is one of the earliest books devoted to the ethics of land management, the author proposes a metaphor for situating the state of ecological science when the book was published in 1949:
“Ecology is an infant just learning to talk and, like other infants, is engrossed with its own coinage of big words.”
The Land Pyramid
Visualizing what the author means with his foundational metaphor of the interconnectedness of nature as a pyramid for modern readers is perhaps best done by corresponding it to the more familiar image of food nutrition pyramid. Except for vegetables and fruit at the bottom and sugar and fat at the top, the Land Pyramid moves upward from soil, plants, leaf-eaters and meat-eaters to the top which is occupied by predators.
"think like a mountain"
The fundamental metaphorical premise of the entire text is the call to “think like a mountain.” The mountain has been there long enough to see everything develop and to take an objective perspective outside of time and immediacy. It is a call for understanding the long-term consequences.
This Land Is My...Country?
Although in other places, the author seems to make little distinction between land and country, using them interchangeably as synonyms, he takes a much more specific approach to the divergence in terms in the chapter titled “Country.” That this divergence takes the form of pure metaphor perhaps explains the discrepancy:
“There is much confusion between land and country. Land is the place where corn, gullies, and mortgages grow. Country is the personality of land, the collective harmony of its soil, life, and weather.”
