Sand County Almanac

by Aldo Leopold

I think there have been more eloquent pleas since Aldo Leopold first wrote A Sand County Almanac in 1949, but his may still be the most concise and cogent summary of the conservation ethic in print. A reviewer in Audubon (Nov 1990, p. 18) called it "the closest text to a bible our movement has produced," and I won't dispute that. Though there are a few improvements I could wish for in our bible, it is still, almost 50 years later, a small book well worth reading.

A Sand County Almanac is divided into 3 parts: the first part, the Almanac, chronicles some brief events and moments through 12 months of the year on a sand-prairie farm in Wisconsin; the second part, the Sketches, contains similar vignettes scattered about the continent, rather than sequential in time. In both these parts, Leopold writes of the land, of wolf packs and mountains, of trout fishing, of geese honking overhead; trying to convey by illustration the values of environmentalism: values of solitude and wildness and husbandry and community. In the third and last part of the book, Upshot, he makes his values explicit, and offers his plea and his justification for conservation, for a "land ethic."

The sketches are, for me, the weakest part of the book; I think those of us who already love the outdoors could, if we chose, write our own sketches, and bring to life our own memories. Still, being already in love with the wild, perhaps I underestimate the impact of Leopold's writing. And amid his sometimes too flowery prose ("Out of some far recess of the sky a tinkling of little bells falls softly upon the listening land...") are some vivid images:

The [passenger] pigeon was a biological storm...

Today the oaks still flaunt their burden at the sky, but the feathered lightning is no more. Worm and weevil must now perform slowly and silently the task that once drew thunder from the firmament.

A biological storm, a thunder from the firmament that not you nor I, nor our children, nor theirs forever after, will see. But one that I can now imagine a little more clearly than I have before.

The first part of the book also offers some special pleasures to local (Illinois/Wisconsin) lovers of prairie, much like having a movie filmed in your home town. He talks of pasque flowers and burr oak "openings," of upland sandpipers and Draba, that smallest flower. ("He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowing. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.") It is funny to read, in a book 50 years old, that graveyards and railways contain some of the few reserves of prairie plants left. Not 3 weeks ago I was at a tiny 1-acre graveyard as near to the middle of nowhere as I've been, harvesting prairie seeds.

Leopold was, according to what I've read, one of the first to stress the non-economic imperatives of saving wilderness: the ethical implications, the benefits to the soul and spirit of a spot of beauty or a place of isolation, the simple need for wildness that many of us feel. He argued ultimately that we have an obligation to the land community of which we are a part, as much as to the social community of which we are a member. "Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community." And as is any ethic, this one is based on long-term mutual need. "A system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest... assumes, falsely, i think, that the economic parts of the biotic clock will function without the uneconomic parts."

These ideas are integral to environmentalism, and I think, more than the sketches, make the book worth reading. The book as a whole, though, has a power that I do not want to underestimate. In New England, the Vermont Audubon Council purchased 1000 copies of this book to put in local hotel rooms, and subsequent sales of the book at a nearby bookstore rose noticeably. Here in Illinois, an association of Soil and Water Conservation Districts developed "an interdisciplinary educational curriculum based on the classic writings" of A Sand County Almanac. Reactions like these, much more than one idiosyncratic opinion (like mine), are a testament to the book's continuing worth, and contribution.

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A small detail: Sand County Almanac And Sketches Here and There was published in 1949. In 1953, I think, a slightly different edition came out, called Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River. It had 8 additional essays, and was somewhat re-arranged. I preferred the organization of the earlier edition, but that may be simply because I read it first. The additional essays in the second book are very much like the sketches in the first, and if you enjoyed the earlier ones then you will enjoy the additions as well. Although I don't think it matters substantially, this review is based on the 1949 edition.

© 1995, Greg Tillman.

latest update: May 30, 2001
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