Health care is a hot topic these days. Pharmaceutical companies and the medical community zealously vie for our consumer dollars. Why this elaborate courting ritual? Peoples interest in how complementary/alternative medicine (CAM) can help them create and maintain their health has grown rapidly over the last ten years. According to the National Institute of Health, between 1990 and 1997 the number of adults reporting use of CAM increased from 60 to 83 million while the use of traditional medicines remained stationary. CAM includes, but is not limited to, homeopathy, hypnosis, herbal therapies, exercise/movement, vitamins, relaxation methods, lifestyle, diet, imagery, energy healing, biofeedback and folk remedies. CAM may be used with allopathic medical care or used as an alternative, such as massage instead of a sleeping pill, hypnotherapy instead of a nicotine patch, or homeopathy instead of antihistamines. In short, there is money to be made. CAM practitioners and the medical community could work together in a spirit of respectful cooperation and collaboration for the benefit of all. In fact, four states have already enacted “Freedom of Access” legislation that allows individuals to use either traditional medicine or CAM. Wouldnt it be great if Georgia were in the forefront of this groundbreaking legislation that shows such far-sighted thinking! The alternative is to waste taxpayer dollars revisiting this issue every year in the form of “tuff war” bills in an on-going effort to eliminate and/or regulate this fast-growing, money-making CAM industry. The following are a few of the bills proposed this year alone. Senate Bill 162, Health Care Protection Act of 2003. This bill would change the penalty for the unlicensed practice of dental hygiene, dietetics, athletic trainers, professional counselors, social workers, marriage and family therapists, physical therapists and others from a misdemeanor to a felony. Under the current law, most CAM practitioners can be found to be in technical violation of the law because state-licensing boards might consider their activities to be the “practice of medicine” and, thus, may use the full force of the states police power to suppress these health care practices.
For the Health of the Land: Previously Unpublished Essays and Other Writings. By Aldo Leopold. Edited by J. Baird Callicott and Eric T. Freyfogle. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999.242 pp. Illustrations, maps, editors notes. $22.95. Aldo Leopolds legacy has been shifting in recent years, as scholars, environmentalists, and aficionados have reassessed his life and thought a half century after his death in 1948. Most readers familiar with Leopold know him through his posthumously published A Sand County Almanac (1949), a book with spare, sparkling prose and a density of insight unparalleled in American environmental writing. But for those interested in the evolution of Leopolds thought, A Sand County Almanac can be deceptive, as Leopold took some license with the facts of his intellectual maturation. A decade ago, Baird Callicott and Susan Flader did Leopold scholars a great service by collecting his most important essays in The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold (1991), which revealed a more complicated man whose epiphanies were less stark than those described in A Sand County Almanac. The River of the Mother of God remains the best primary-source introduction to Leopolds thought. The two books under review here- The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quotations and Commentaries, edited by Curt Meine and Richard L. Knight, and Aldo Leopolds For the Health of the Land: Previously Unpublished Essays and Other Writings, edited by J. Baird Callicott and Eric T. Freyfogle-are yet further evidence of our evolving appreciation of Leopolds importance. For the Health of the Land focuses on perhaps the most important new theme in Leopold scholarship: his interest in private land-and particularly farmland– conservation. Leopold spent most of his later career working on and thinking about these issues, though, for various reasons, they have not been given the scholarly attention they deserve. For the Health of the Land should help to change that. The meat of the volume is what the editors have called “A Landowners Conservation Almanac,” a series of forty brief and previously uncollected essays that Leopold originally wrote for the Wisconsin Agriculturist and Farmer between 1938 and 1942. Mostly, these missives, a few of which were later published as sketches in A Sand County Almanac, offer advice to farmers on making their lands produce wildlife as well as conventional crops. This almanac, which Leopold had at one point hoped to publish as a book, is sandwiched between two other sections of essays on rural game management and land health respectively. Many of the pieces in these two sections have appeared elsewhere, but in unison they make resounding what has been an understated theme in Leopolds writing: that the nations great conservation task was (and perhaps still is) to get farmers to propagate wildness and otherwise care for the public values that inhere in their vast private domain. Essential to this argument was a recognition on Leopolds part that public lands conservation could never be anything more than a partial solution to the nations environmental problems, and that too heavy a reliance on government ownership would promote an ethical surrogacy destructive of the very sorts of personal relationships with the land that Leopold saw as crucial to successful conservation. This was, and remains, a strong challenge to the overwhelming public lands orientation of American conservation politics. Because it lends such a strong voice to this particular line of reasoning, For the Health of the Land is an important new collection of Leopolds writings.
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