A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation from Round River is a classic writing on nature and ecology by an American ecologist and forester Aldo Leopold. It was first published in 1949 but achieved prominence twenty-odd years later, in the 1970s, when the so-called environmental awakening took place (Kahler). What particularly amazes me when reading it today is that A Sand County Almanac seems more relevant than ever: the issues Leopold described almost eighty years ago are the issues people deal with today. The purpose of this work, it seems, is to open the reader’s eyes to a wonderful world around them and make them think about the way humans treat it.
The book impressed me profoundly: after having finished the last sections of its first part, I realized that I did not look at the world around me the same way anymore. Perhaps, it is a phase that will pass as soon as the effect that this work had on me begins to wane. However, when looking at a swamp, a tree, or a dog, now I see much more than I used to see; I see the form of life that is mysterious and incomprehensible to us. Leopold draws one’s attention to how much is going on in nature at any given moment. It might seem insignificant, but in reality, as the author shows, can teach a person important lessons about life and death, change and loss.
I share the author’s main idea that is a unifying thread in the book’s narrative: a person is responsible for the land on which they live. Leopold calls for recognizing this responsibility not only before the nature, but before those who will come after us as well. It prompted me to consider my approach to living, especially in times as turbulent as now, when climate change, extinction of precious flora and fauna and other global challenges demand change. Evidently, Leopold could not have foreseen that; however, he believed that the ethics that give direction to our relationship with the environment have to constantly evolve. These ethics are perfectly summarized by a single line from the foreword to the book: “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect” (Leopold, 18-19). If more people had seen land this way, we might be living in a better world right now.
When it comes to the author’s writing style, I would describe it as moving and inspiring, which is a bit surprising considering how he was not a writer in the usual sense of the word. However, I believe that it was an intentional choice of his, not to write this book as a scientist, but to do it as a poet: this way, it affected many more people than it would have otherwise. As per Blomberg, Leopold’s writing style pushes one towards “personal acts of interpretation”, and, as per Horst, his descriptions “linger in the back of [one’s] mind”. Scientific language and numerical data cannot be out of the ordinary when speaking about ecology and environmentalism, yet they would have distracted the reader from Leopold’s underlying message. This underlying message targets a person’s logic as much as it targets their feeling, and therefore, the approach chosen by the author was that successful.
Works Cited
Blomberg, Ken. “A Story Behind Every Bush: Leopold’s Writing Life.” Aldo Leopold, 2017.
Horst, David. “A Good Read.” Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, 2020.
Kahler, Kathryn A. “Environmental Awakening.” Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, 2020.
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation from Round River. Ballantine Books, 1970.