A Sand County Almanac is a
collection of essays
in three parts. The first part is a tour of his Wisconsin farm covering each
month of the year. Actually, it is not a farm in the sense of being a business
that produces food
and fiber. It was abandoned as a farm and hiding place for illegal stills when
Leopold bought it as a semi-wild getaway. To be fair, though, it was abandoned
as a farm because of practices that destroyed much of its productive capacity,
and Leopold’s theme is land management. He approaches that theme gently in the
first part. A reader can have the sense of strolling around the place with
Leopold as he points out the plants and animals
that live there, full-time or seasonally, and shares his enthusiasm for them.
In the second part, Leopold expands the scope to cover many places in
the central and western United States,
and even a few places in Mexico and Canada. These essays
also recount his personal experiences relating to wild lands. In some of these
essays he begins to touch more firmly on points of land management and policy.
In the final part, Leopold’s essays are more direct. The point of the
book is that, if Americans, or people generally, want to have a rich landscape,
wildlife, and land that is productive for generations, we need to value land in
a new way and take new approaches to managing it.
The culmination of this discussion is the land ethic. Ethics
are essentially about community, and
the appropriate and acceptable relationships
between the members of the community and each member and the community as a
whole. A land ethic treats the land as a part of the community. In land,
Leopold includes “soils, waters, plants, and animals.” Land is a part of our
community that produces things of both economic
and ineffable value. The land ethic implies that we have obligations to each
other and to the land to conserve it. Conservation
isn’t simply a matter or protecting specific areas, plants or animals. There is
a place for policy, but the ethic is also individual, and a successful
conservation efforts will mean landowners will need to treat the land and
something inherently valuable. We would conserve ethically out of a sense of humility,
realizing that the land is much more complex that we understand, and that our
progress can outpace our understanding with possibly irreversible undesirable
results.
Reconnecting to the land, and learning to value it, is encouraged by
Leopold. Arguably, the first two parts of the book are intended to give the
reader a sense of connection to the land. On the policy front, he suggests that
many of the things we do to connect people to wilderness is destroying the
wilderness. A land ethic could be a curative for this because aware people
could connect to the land (especially wild plants and animals) close to home,
even in cities, and be able to appreciate even wilder places from a distance.
He goes so far as to suggest that amateur wildlife research could become a new
type of sportsmanship, and cites cases were amateurs managing their own small
plots have contributed to our understanding of wildlife.
It should be noted that, in addition to being a collection of
thoughtful essays on nature, A Sand
County Almanac is beautifully written. He can be poetical and political
in the same sentence, such as “Hemisphere solidarity is new among statesmen,
but not among the feathered navies of the sky.” He expresses himself with a
gentle, homey cynicism as when he wrote, “Education, I fear, is learning to see
one thing by going blind to another.”
*
If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County
Almanac and Sketches from Here and There. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1949.
