BookBrowse Reviews A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

BookBrowse:

A classic of environmental writing that is strikingly relevant today.

The canon of great nature writing includes the likes of Walden by Henry David Thoreau and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the latter being a seminal force in awakening the public's environmental consciousness. Alongside these classics rests A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, which may not be quite as famous but is just as powerful in inspiring an appreciation of the natural world and an understanding of humans' impact upon it.

A Sand County Almanac was first published in 1949, just after the author died fighting a fire on a farm neighboring his own — Leopold's farm being the primary location of his nature observations and the majority of the book's subject matter. The timing makes the book feel like an elegy, which in many ways it is, although Leopold meant it as one for the land, not himself. Despite being over 75 years old now, the text is surprisingly relevant and will sound very modern to contemporary readers.

A naturalist by profession, Leopold studied at Yale, joined the US Forest Service, and eventually became a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison teaching wildlife management. He begins the book with a year's worth of essays about the landscape and wildlife on his farm in rural eastern Wisconsin. Part I consists of snapshots of each month from January to December. The Sand Counties are right in the heart of the Midwest and along important migration routes, so the plants and animals he describes there have a universal quality (everyone knows what geese are). He shares his observations of the local flora and fauna on and around his farm, from songbirds to migrating shorebirds to indigenous prairie plants. In February's essay, for example, he gives the reader a romping history of how this landscape changed with the coming of European settlers, the establishment of farmland, and the draining of the marshes, all through the lens of a fallen oak tree's rings.

He also documents the habitat loss in the region, as his little farm is one of the only plots left wild (he wasn't raising crops but rather living and writing there). We see how the ecosystem functions when left alone, such as when diseased trees become sources of food and shelter for animals, increasing the biodiversity on Leopold's farm compared to that of his neighbors. This also demonstrates how "circularity" isn't some new buzzword but is simply how the environment actually works.

The essays in Part II start in Wisconsin but take us farther afield. His observations of landscapes and wilderness move into the desert southwest, into Chihuahua and Sonora in Mexico, back into Oregon and Utah, and finally into Manitoba. Throughout these essays, Leopold recounts massive extinctions, like that of the passenger pigeon, which younger readers may not even know about (see Beyond the Book).

The problem of removing apex predators like wolves and grizzly bears, and the long destructive march of habitat loss in all North American regions, are chronicled with sadness but loving memories, like in any good eulogy. Leopold was also one of the first writers to capture the paradox of creating parks to conserve wilderness that then becomes overdeveloped and overcrowded: "Parks are made to bring the music to the many, but by the time many are attuned to hear it there is little left but noise."

These observations and their related calls to action form Part III of the book. Here, Leopold articulates his concerns about how we perceive and interact with the land, and he argues that wilderness is valuable not because of anything humanity gets from it, but just for its own sake. This "land ethic" that he calls for will sound familiar to today's readers, as heirs of the environmental movement and victims of climate change. But in the context of the breakneck growth of the American economy of the mid-20th century, this was a revolutionary re-thinking of humanity's relationship with nature: that landscapes and living things should be treated with respect, not as resources for economic gain. He criticizes the capitalistic underpinnings of land usage and notes that government intervention (i.e., mandated conservation) can only go so far. Individuals must change their outlook on the environment if we're to maintain one that functions at all because the environment needs all its parts, not just the ones we deem "profitable."

Leopold also foresaw many of today's trends: the overcrowding of national parks that has become so damaging in our time, and the potential of organic farming techniques as an alternative to conventional methods that destroy soil fertility and biodiversity. The only thing he didn't anticipate was social media and the Instagram influencer — his claim that tourists seeking photos were "one of the few innocuous parasites on wild nature" has proven depressingly inaccurate.

But no one expects a naturalist from the 1940s to have had a crystal ball. Yet it nearly seems like Leopold did. The issues of habitat loss, extinction, and economic exploitation have only become more devastating, and addressing them with a land ethic that values nature for its own sake becomes more urgent with each passing day and new disaster. Climate change was barely an idea when Leopold was studying the land and writing about it, but everything he argued for is now desperately relevant as global impacts on the environment become more dire.

We need a land ethic — and works like A Sand County Almanac that open peoples' eyes to it — now more than ever.

This review first ran in the January 29, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.