Sand County Almanac - Aldo Leopold - Part 1

Sandy Couny Almanac -
Aldo Leopold

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 66

  March 7, 2017 

Book 19 - Sand County Almanac
by Aldo Leopold (1949)
 Part 1 - pages 1-211
Reading Time - 5 hours

I gave a bit of a squeak of dismay when I picked up this book from the library. It is over 800 pages long!! I heaved a sigh of relief when I realized that this was a collection of Leopold's writings and that the Sand County Almanac was a very palatable 200 pages or so. I tucked right into it... and got a bit bogged down.

Leopold is kind of like an early 1900s version of Thoreau. Think Walden's Pond but the field and forest bit. Leopold has a keen eye for nature and an even keener eye for how humanity runs roughshod over nature. Even though this was written in the 1930s and 1940s, it is still as poignant today. I had never heard of Leopold before... but Amazon has this to say about him:

Since his death in 1948, Aldo Leopold has been increasingly recognized as one of the indispensable figures of American environmentalism. A pioneering forester, sportsman, wildlife manager, and ecologist, he was also a gifted writer whose farsighted land ethic is proving increasingly relevant in our own time. Now, Leopold’s essential contributions to our literature––some hard-to-find or previously unpublished––are gathered in a single volume for the first time. Here is his classic A Sand County Almanac, hailed––with Thoreau’s Walden and Carson’s Silent Spring––as one of the main literary influences on the modern environmental movement. Published in 1949, it is still astonishing today: a vivid, firsthand, philosophical tour de force. Along with Sand County are more than fifty articles, essays, and lectures exploring the new complexities of ecological science and what we would now call environmental ethics. Leopold’s sharp-eyed, often humorous journals are illustrated here for the first time with his original photographs, drawings, and maps. Also unique to this collection is a selection of over 100 letters, most of them never before published, tracing his personal and professional evolution and his efforts to foster in others the love and sense of responsibility he felt for the land. 

I didn't read anything other than the Sand County Almanac. Leopold is a guy that you can't read quickly. A 5 page essay on conservation really needs several readings and a bunch of thoughtful mulling in between. I definitely recommend the book, but beware, it's not something you want to rush through. In some ways, I think this book is best read when you are sitting outside, maybe just before sunrise, at a marsh, or river bank, perhaps the ocean, watching the world wake-up. Read Leopold and then put him down and read the world around. That's what he did. He just managed to write his experience down much more articulately than most of us!