by Aldo Leopold
Oxford University Press, 2020
It seems apt – or perhaps ironic – that Aldo Leopold’s classic environmental tome was reissued this year in honor of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. I finished reading A Sand County Almanac – or re-reading it for the first time since my post-college, Colorado-living years – in the waning days of the summer of 2020. It was a summer that had been uncomfortably busy in the mountains near where I live in New Hampshire, as people sought outdoor experiences within a day’s drive of their urban and suburban residences during the pandemic, some of them leaving behind heaps of trash, trail graffiti, and words carved into trees. Meanwhile, the impacts of a changing climate hit hard in the Southeast, where hurricanes wreaked what has become increasingly regular havoc on coastal communities, and in the western states, ablaze in a wildfire season unlike any other, with millions of acres of forest burning and hundreds of thousands of people ordered to evacuate their homes.
In her introduction of the latest issue of A Sand County Almanac, Barbara Kingsolver – an environmental writer of the modern era – describes the book as “a seminal 20th-century work that shifted human understanding of our environment.” The environmental emergencies of 2020 indicate we are still working to understand that environment. So many of the concerns Leopold raised some 70 years ago through his writing seem relevant still. We are still pondering the ethical questions of human “progress” over nature, still battling invasive species, still trying to find some common ground between caring for the land and harvesting its resources.
A forester by training and a philosophical environmentalist by nature, Leopold organized his book into three sections: A Sand County Almanac, containing essays about his family’s farm; Sketches Here and There, covering his experiences in the wildness of Arizona, Colorado, and elsewhere during a time when those places were vastly wilder than they are now; and The Upshot, which contains his famous final chapter, “The Land Ethic.”
But it was his opening line, right in the foreword written in March 1948, that pulled me in: “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.”
One of the ongoing dilemmas, of course, is conserving those wild things as more and more people discover the benefits of being in ever-shrinking wild places. “Like ions shot from the sun, the week-enders radiate from every town, generating heat and friction as they go,” Leopold wrote all those years ago in “Conservation Esthetic,” part of the final section of the book. In these chapters, the author debates the concept of “managing” the land and the species that live upon it. He laments the increase of “recreationalists” to the countryside and the resulting loss of wilderness areas as more and more people push deeper and deeper into spaces once untouched – or, at least, only lightly traveled – by humans. He decries the valuing of profit from the land over the caring for and conservation of it.
“All ethics…rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts…. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it,” Leopold wrote. “It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.” This seems a lesson we Homo sapiens are still, painfully, learning. Reading this final section was in turns discouraging and enlightening, sad and hopeful.
It was Part I: A Sand County Almanac that brought me the most enjoyment as a reader. Here, the author introduces us to the seasons – and the trees and animals and landscapes – of his family’s Wisconsin farm. Although the setting is a midwestern one from several decades ago, these tales and tellings are relatable to those of us living now in rural places in the Northeast. He begins with January, when “after the midwinter blizzards, there comes a night of thaw when the tinkle of dripping water is heard in the land… [and] the hibernating skunk, curled up in his deep den, uncurls himself and ventures forth to prowl the wet world, dragging his belly in the snow.” He then goes on to wax poetic about such things as sawing an old oak from his property and turning it into firewood, the springtime dance of the woodcock, and the winter chickadees on the farm.
These are writings of the rhythm of the seasons in a place Leopold knew and loved – and about how that rhythm was shifting with human-affected changes. It is a song still being sung, one of both loss and hope. As Kingsolver so eloquently puts it: “When I came to A Sand County Almanac this time around, I was dragging a heavy heart. And was startled to find something I’d never noticed before in these pages: a pathway to détente. Maybe even progress…. [Leopold] may help you see past the frustrating divides that plague the awfullest failure of our day, as we try to reconcile human subsistence with the needs of our damaged biological home. If you’ve lost all hope of finding a common language for that conversation, you may well find it here.”