A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There

Well, l love non-fiction and nature so l finally read this all-time classic. How many different ways can one describe the day's clouds? I also recently read The Grapes of Wrath. Conclusion: "Great" authors, for example, can fill a page telling us about a turtle crossing the road. Not my "cup of tea."

Leopold has completely changed the way I see the natural world. His close encounters of various animals show his immense knowledge regarding them. This is was man that has seen animals leave this world for good, and he tries to let us know how we need to change before they are all gone.

Long considered the first book on conservation, this should be read by everyone. The author's love of land, wildlife and nature are fully expressed. Those thoughts are followed by philosophizing on conservation - ethics, practice, economics, etc. Written in the nascent stages of conservation in this country, a time when it was more thought than practice, the issues still resonate today. One sees the difficulties both in expanding environmental conservation as well as the pitfalls and errors made in the area (with all good intent) since the forties when Leopald wrote.Interestingly, especially to me as someone who hunts, much is written in the context of hunting. He also has some insightful words about why people do hunt as a connection to nature. As only a hunter can, he identifies the hunter's reverance for the land and nature.Portions of this were assigned when I was in college. Now, 28 years later, the entirety means much more. It should be required reading for everyone, especially lovers of the outdoors.

The "Almanac" has been published several ways during the past fifty years, I strongly recommend the book published by Oxford University Press. It includes Thinking like a Mountain, The Land Ethic, and other important essays.From Leopold's Sketches: "Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language."Scientist, educator, forester, philosopher, writer -- Aldo Leopold appears to many as something of an enigma. In his earlier writings, Leopold was a very different man than we find in this volume. In Leopold's own words: "I was young then, and full or trigger-itch." This insightful classic is a gentle, scholarly, fatherly collection of essays, observations and stories. Like Thoreau's Walden, it is revered, loved and widely imitated. Leopold: "Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf. ... The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf's job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have ... rivers washing the future into the sea."

Aldo Leopold's brief book is a lyrical and poeitic expression of the passion and reverence that the author had for the natural world. Just a piece of wasteland, an old farm, is transformed for the reader into the magic place it was to Leopold. "...I am glad that I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map." expresses Leopold's wish for the preservation of wild places of solitude where nature abounds. A Sand County Almanac has provided me with a wealth of wonderful quotes for my environment and biology classes.

There are few books on conservation, wildlife and nature that haven't been quickly obsoleted, are hoplessly trapped in period pop cultural amber, are fronts for naive political extremism or are simply irrelevant. Aldo Leopold's "A Sand County Almanac" is one of those few; composed of illuminating vignettes dealing with practical knowledge of and experience in the North American wilderness, thoughtful critiques of today's accepted notions of wildlife and land "management," and the realistic acceptance of the human role as a predator within nature's massive food chain. Leopold believed humanity's ever-increasing physical and psychological isolation from full but equal participation in all parts of the natural world's reality--its beauty and wonder as well as its cruelty and danger--has been to its severe detriment. This trend, to him, is leading us to environmental carelessness, colossal misuse and waste of natural resources, and, worst of all, gives rise to an aberrant social ideology reveling in the fatuous cartoon fantasy of nature being a big, happy, perpetually peaceful commune if only humans weren't there. After looking at our sad record of pollution, repeated habitat destruction, poaching, overfishing and listening to the endless, arrogant prattle of government bureaucrats, pop conservationists and so-called animal rights activists, it seems Leopold is indeed a prophet for our times