SCOTT BROCATO:
So for those who are not familiar with it, what is the Leopold Writing Program and what is its mission?
NINA A. SIMON:
The Leopold Writing Program is an environmental writing and advocacy organization based in New Mexico. We've been around for 14 years, and our mission is to inspire an ethic of caring for our planet by cultivating diverse voices through the spoken and written word. Basically, what this means is that we have a variety of programs aimed at uplifting the voices of future environmental leaders and building a community around that.
SCOTT BROCATO:
And what sort of programs are you speaking of?
NINA A. SIMON:
So we have three main programs. And just a little bit of background about our name, the Leopold Writing Program. We are named after Aldo Leopold, who was a forester, conservationist, outdoor enthusiast, educator, and philosopher and writer. He is best known as the author of A Sand County Almanac, which came out in 1949. And in that book he came up with this concept of the land ethic, which is essentially this idea that community as a concept should be enlarged to include non- human elements such as soils, waters, plants, animals are collectively the land. And this, of course, is not a concept that he came up with out of the blue. This has existed for many other cultures. But in America at that time, it was a very revolutionary thought, and it still kind of inspires environmental thinking today. An important thing to note about Aldo Leopold is: it’s not that he just came up with this concept, it's that his writing was really influential, and he was a very talented writer, so he was able to share these concepts widely. And so that's sort of where our concept comes from with the Leopold Writing Program is to be inspiring environmental activism through the written word, just as Aldo Leopold did.
So there's three programs that we run. They're aimed at meeting every point of where a writer might be. So our first program is the Leopold Writing Contest, which was for 6th to 12th graders all over New Mexico. They're invited to submit an essay each year that we will then judge, and there's a winner from that contest. We've been running that since 2009 and we've had over 2000 participants. In this last year, we've had 187 students submit their work. So that's a really important piece for inspiring the next generation of environmental writers. And we really are the teachers, the teachers of New Mexico are our allies in that work. So we really encourage teachers to look up our website, look up the contest and share it with your students to get them engaged.
The second program was the Aldo and Estella Leopold Residency Program. So Aldo and Estella Leopold lived in New Mexico in Tres Piedras, in what was known as Mi Casita. Their little house in Tres Pietras, it was a very influential place for Aldo Leopold. And so we invite mid-career, early to mid-career environmental writers to apply for this residency where they get to stay in that actual house for an entire month in the summer and work on a piece of writing. So that's been a really great way to engage with writers who are kind of up and coming and trying to get their work out there.
And the final program that we run is the Annual Leopold Lecture, where we bring in writers who are fairly well known in the environmental world in their writing. And the idea behind that is both to be able to spread their work farther and to inspire the public, because these are events that are open to the public. So we really are trying to spread our word as much as possible through a variety of ways.
So those are our three main programs, and we're always looking for other ways to be engaging with our community to be expanding those programs, or just collaborating with other organizations to see how we can be spreading this kind of work.
SCOTT BROCATO:
Going back to your writing contest that's underway now, it has some essay prompt questions. What are the essay prompt questions?
NINA A. SIMON:
So this essay prompt, it pulls from one of Aldo Leopold's essays. So there's a quote from Aldo Leopold, and then the prompt comes out of that quote. So the quote from his essay, “Engineering and Conservation”, which came out in 1938, is: “Our tools are better than we are, and grow better, faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides, but they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.”
And so with that in mind, the essay prompt is, “Are our tools better than we are? Think about tools in your life. Do they help or hurt your relationship with our ecological community?”
SCOTT BROCATO:
And did you say there were prizes involved?
NINA A. SIMON:
There are. It's a financial incentive. So the winners of these programs actually get a payment. We think that writing is valuable enough that students should be able to earn money for writing a good essay. They'll receive cash prizes.
SCOTT BROCATO:
And how can students enter the writing contest and when is the deadline?
NINA A. SIMON:
So the deadline to submit for the contest is February 15th at 6:00 PM. The way to submit is to visit leopoldwritingprogram.org, and we have a submission portal through our website.
