Book Spotlight:
A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
Coming up:
- Overview
- Context
- Writing Style
- Who's it for?
- What gave me the fizz?
- Essays
- Criticism
- Difficulty
Overview
Aldo Leopold’s three part almanac is a reverent letter to nature, ecology and the ethics they are torn between. Leopold is more than an experienced naturalist—he is a storyteller, a philosopher, a scientist and a symbol of rugged American independence, with every personality wrapped into this book.
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Part one is beautiful writing for beautiful writing’s sake. Leopold fondly recalls life in his shack—his ‘weekend refuge from too much modernity,’ a neglected hovel amidst some equally unloved marshland in Wisconsin, which Leopold took upon himself to restore.
This portion is best described as a warm memory. It makes you nostalgic for childish exploration in the forest: lifting rocks, crawling under fell trees and finding a secret spot that you defend like it's a bank vault. Here, Leopold shares tales of the hunt with his dog, gossip of the rich life around him, and the reflections which come only to a man at peace in the outdoors, all in a playful, cosy tone.
“My dog, by the way, thinks I have much to learn about partridges, and, being a professional naturalist, I agree. He persists in tutoring me, with the calm patience of a professor of logic, in the art of drawing deductions from an educated nose. I delight in seeing him deduce a conclusion, in the form of a point, from data that are obvious to him, but speculative to my unaided eye. Perhaps he hopes is dull pupil will one day learn to smell.”
His stories make you want to run outside and listen to the birdsong chorus you once neglected.
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Part two, Sketches Here and There, takes a more somber tone. It’s a series of essays on the loss of wilderness, the creeping fist of modernity and the failure of conservation to relieve its grip from the land.
Leopold is no politician. He's an experienced naturalist with a great cavern of intuition, enough to read the world around him, from the soil to the treetops, with skill you expect from a tribal hunter or an intrepid explorer:
“There is much small-talk and neighborhood gossip among pines. By paying heed to this chatter, I learn what has transpired during the week when I am absent in town. Thus in March, when the deer frequently browse white pines, the height of the browsings tells me how hungry they are. A deer full of corn is too lazy to nip branches more than four feet above the ground; a really hungry deer rises on his hind legs and nips as high as eight feet. Thus I learn the gastronomic status of the deer without seeing them, and I learn, without visiting his field, whether my neighbor has hauled in his cornshocks.”
Leopold’s humble station and plain English lets us connect to his words. We feel his relief and grievance from an equal footing—it means something, much more than when guilt or hope is flung down at us from the balcony of a soulless corporate entity or a snobby group of environmentalists.
A Sand County Almanac is not a technical book. Even so, beyond the classroom, ecology can be a slog through graphs, buzzwords and fearmongering—it’s a bit out there for a layman. This book brings it down to earth and explains big concepts in simple words, like this example of predator-prey relationships, which explains why it’s not always good if too many cute, cuddly herbivores survive:
“Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end, the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers.”
“I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.”
I never felt so much sympathy for a rock until now.
This portion is a nice throwback to old-school environmentalism, where harmony, balance and sustainable exploitation were at heart. It’s the conservation of the tribal man and the pioneer, the twin souls of America.
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Part three is The Upshot: a series of more formal essays dealing with the ethics of conversation. Leopold looks at the psychology behind our destructive habits and tries to pick up the broken pieces of conservation with his ‘Land Ethic,’ a moral code of respect and responsibility to the natural world. Part two cried its woes, and part three aims to soothe them.
Context
“As earnest a boy as we have in school… painstaking in his work… Moral character above reproach,” so wrote one of his principals in college. That’s where his journey in ecology began as he hopped from Yale’s forestry school to the US Forest service before eventually landing a professor role at the University of Wisconsin in game management and agricultural economics.
It’s much easier to teach game management when you have shot at them yourself.
The Almanac began with a deed to 80 acres in the ‘sand country’ of central Wisconsin—a conservation project of his own. Leopold found a land crushed under cowfoot, charred by flames and drained of life by the steel vampire of the logging industry—barren, such that only a man of patience and knowledge could ever have a chance to restore it. This book was written based on that rebirth.
As Leopold fought a wild fire on his neighbor’s land in 1948, a heart attack took his life at 61 years of age.
Writing Style
A Sand County Almanac is technically book one out of three. Each comes with a different tone and conviction, from the flowery prose of book one to the precise logic of the last. There is something for all readers and a journey through many moods if you are happy to explore all three.
The first part welcomes you through the door with brief, journal-like entries sharing a slice of Leopold’s daily life in the shack. Leopold’s prose is beautiful—you’ll see some more snippets soon, but I hesitate to share too much because I want you to get immersed yourself.
The book leans more formal over time as it switches to essay-style text in books two and three. Both remain free from academic pomp and hold true to a humble, easy demeanor, while still challenging the reader with philosophical ideas.
Above all, this book is cosy. It conjures up soft, warm imagery which makes us love the wilderness, especially when met with the painful contrast of conversation’s failure. Peril dances on the edge of hope—every bit of pessimism is balanced with optimism, some kind of solution. This back and forth sets a nice rhythm for your read through.
What impressed me, as a writer, was Leopold’s ability to capture stories in the mundane yet brilliant everyday—stories the city-dweller would miss. One of my favourites came early, where Leopold gives us a solemn warning:
“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”
He tells the story of an oak tree he felled—each growth ring a piece of history, from it’s birth in the Civil War, to its survival against grazing rabbits, and finally, its death at the hand of the axe.
“My dog does not care where heat comes from, but he cares ardently that it come, and soon. Indeed he considers my ability to make it come as something magical, for when I rise in the cold black pre-dawn and kneel shivering by the hearth making a fire, he pushes himself blandly between me and the kindling splits I have laid on the ashes, and I must touch a match to them by poking it between his legs. Such faith, I suppose, is the kind that moves mountains.”
Hell, even an atom is given a journey worth talking about. In the Odyssey chapter, Leopold tracks an unnamed atom as it moves through the ecological cycle, freed by a root from it’s eternal imprisonment in the limestone.
“He helped build a flower, which became an acorn, which fattened a deer, which fed an Indian, all in a single year.”
That was only the first leg of it’s journey—the rest is yours to read.
These stories give humanity to nature and animate what we tend to shrug off. They reveal a hidden microcosm under our nose, a secret society of creatures—their lives, their struggles and their charms. In this passage, he talks of a flower with the same reverence as a race of people—it becomes alive, conflicted and oppressed.
“The erasure of a human subspecies is largely painless- to us -if we know little enough about it. A dead Chinaman is of little importance to us whose awareness of things Chinese is bounded by an occasional dish of chow mein. We grieve only for what we know. The erasure of Silphium from western Dane County is no cause for grief if one knows it only as a name in a botany book.”
Who’s it for?
Based on my own experience with ecology in college, I see this book as a great introduction to the topic. You see it’s genesis as a mainstream issue, from the words of a pioneer in the same hall of fame as Thoreau, Roosevelt, Muir and Carson.
I also recommend this to urbanites who wish to love nature again. Most of the world now lives in concrete zoos, and many of us only get a glimpse of wilderness a few times a year. It’s easy to forget what we’re missing. A Sand County Almanac inspires you to get out the door and live as part of the world, not in exile of it.
From the window of philosophy, this is a gift to the modern environmentalism debate. Harmony versus exploitation. Hunters versus vegans. Fossil fuel loyalists versus green energy visionaries. Whatever you can think of, Leopold has a hand to raise in the matter. Today, it remains a toxic debate on almost every front. Each side has deep ideological roots and that makes it hard for us to look beyond our loyalties and work towards a common end: conservation. Leopold is a voice of both sides.
What gave me the fizz?
One chapter, 65290, tells the story of a chickadee in the ‘class of 1937.’ He was part of a banding program, where the birds are caught and tagged to track their population. This one would prove different from the rest:
“When he first entered our trap he showed no visible evidence of genius. Like his classmates, his valor for suet was greater than his discretion. Like his classmates, he bit my finger while being taken out of the trap. When banded and released he fluttered up to a limb, pecked his new aluminum anklet in mild annoyance, shook his mussed feathers, cursed gently, and hurried away to catch up with the gang. It is doubtful whether he drew any philosophical deductions from his experience, for he was caught again three times that same winter.”
Through years that follow, Leopold tracks this not-so-smart chickadee and sees his peers die off one by one, lost to the winter’s cold.
“By the fifth winter 65290 was the sole survivor of his generation. Signs of genius were still lacking, but of his extraordinary capacity of living, there was now historical proof.”
“I know so little about birds that I can only speculate on why 65290 survived his fellows. Was he more clever in dodging his enemies? What enemies? A chickadee is almost too small to have any.”
When our lone chickadee fails to show up in the traps the following years, we grieve a little. Leopold made me attached to this nameless, ditzy bird, enough to mourn his loss after the close of the chapter.
“It seems likely that weather is the only killer so devoid of both humor and dimension as to kill a chickadee. I suspect that in the chickadee Sunday School two mortal sins are taught: thou shalt not venture into windy places in winder, though shalt not get wet before a blizzard.”
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The story of the passenger pigeon cut through me too. Leopold recounts how Wisconsin put up a statue of the bird in memory of its disappearance—a generational death, witnessed by the older residents and perhaps unknown to the youth.
“There will always be pigeons in books and in museums, but there are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and to all delights. Book-pigeons cannot dive out of a cloud to make the deer run for cover, or clap their wings in thunderous applause of mast-laden woods. Book-pigeons cannot breakfast on new-mown wheat in Minnesota, and dine on blueberries in Canada. They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all.”
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My absolute favorite chapter lies just a few pages later, one which makes us long for a freedom we are starved of in the city.
In this passage, Leopold finished his meal, fed his dog, washed the dishes and was ready for a calm sunset evening. His dog wasn’t as calm. There was movement in the air—his ears cocked, his nose perked, and his snout pointed to the river. Something was afoot. He then jumped into cover, cautious and afraid.
Leopold stood up to investigate, and his fears were soon eased when he spotted the cause of alarm: two college boys paddling downstream on a canoe.
“‘What time is it?’ was their first question. They explained that their watches had run down, and for the first time in their lives there was no clock, whistle or radio to set watches by. For two days they had lived by ‘sun-time,’ and were getting a thrill out of it. No servant brought them meals: they got their meat out of the river, or went without. No traffic cop whistled them off the hidden rock in the next rapids. No friendly roof kept them dry when they misguessed whether or not to pitch the tent. No guide showed them which camping spots offered a nightlong breeze, and which a nightlong misery of mosquitoes; which firewood made clean coals, and which only smoke.”
“Before our young adventurers pushed off downstream, we learned that both were slated for the Army upon the conclusion of their trip. Now the motif was clear. This trip was their first and last taste of freedom, an interlude between two regimentations: the campus and the barracks.”
“The wilderness gave them the first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.”
Essays
I thought to include this extra section to collect some of the essay topics in case any excite your curiosity.
The philosophical trunk that Leopold builds from is his ‘Land Ethic.’ This is an analysis of how mankind must interact with the land, both for it’s care and exploitation—Leopold is no college dropout who suggests we run off into the forest and start our own communes. Exploitation is part of the land ethic, and not something to be inherently scared of.
The Land Ethic is an early argument for a now-common behaviour: the invisible moral code for how we respect nature. Today, we collectively banish plastic straws, quit ordering useless crap online, and switch to reusable toilet paper. Ok, not the last one. But caring for nature is now part of the public consciousness, and it’s a modern mirror to Leopold’s then-new idea, his Land Ethic.
He calls it a ‘community instinct-in-the-making,’ and more formally later on:
‘A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land.’
It is largely a filler for conservation’s failure, which Leopold says ‘proceeds at a snail’s pace; progress still consists largely of letterhead pieties and convention oratory.’
And here, in one of my favorite passages:
“Of the 6000 grizzlies officially reported as remaining in areas owned by the United States, 5000 are in Alaska. Only five states have any at all. There seems to be a tacit assumption that if grizzlies survive in Canada and Alaska, that is good enough. It is not good enough for me. The Alaskan bears are a distinct species. Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness to heaven; one may never get there.”
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In the Conservation Esthetic chapter, Leopold looks at the wilderness from the ground—from the eyes of the hiker, the hunter and the suburban dad who likes to kayak once in a while.
We all see nature as a commodity- something to be used and enjoyed -for the freedom, isolation and adventure it offers. This is an innocent face, but also the cause of its fate, which is excess, irresponsible recreation, pushes by the gears of business.
It’s a tragic paradox, because for nature to be respected, it must be experienced, but if everyone experiences it, it dies.
Leopold relates that theme to psychology: the desire for freedom, the reason we hunt for trophies, and how gadgets ruin the honor behind outdoor recreation. The conversation then swings to sociology as we see how cultures grow from nature, and how we imbue the wilderness with an intrinsic value.
“To the laborer in the sweat of his labor, the raw stuff on his anvil is an adversary to be conquered. So was wilderness an adversary to the pioneer.”
Criticism
Many of Leopold’s stories and references revolve around American parks, towns and cities. Even for an American today, I suspect that many of the regional references will be hard to picture, or more importantly, relate to. That’s ok. It’s a stretch to even call it a criticism. If anything, it adds a cultural soul to the book, and even a gust of American patriotism. It’s just something to be aware of.
The book can also get a little repetitive, which is expected, being three books in one. You see the same handful of core ideas pop up regularly. Again, I file this under criticism, but it’s also an advantage: it’s great to meet the same ideas over again, that you may reread, digest and flesh out in your mind. Sometimes, you need the ‘fluff’ to slow you down and let the book resonate with you. It’s no struggle either when you consider how pleasant Leopold’s writing is.
Difficulty
The romantic tone of the book means it’s not as straightforward as it could be, but equally, Leopold is not speaking to experts here. A layman can understand the ecological terms, and while it’s not the best place to become familiar with the subject, you are not left in the dust either.
The more philosophical parts ask you to slow down and think, but the central point is always clear and even if you feel confused at some segments, you will likely walk away with the substance of the book.