A Sand County Almanac...
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A Sand County
Almanac and
Sketches
Here and There
by Aldo Leopold
Oxford University Press, 1949
Before there was theory of Gaia, or a science of climate change, or an omnivore with a dilemma, there was Aldo Leopold and A Sand County Almanac. Rereading this book, which was first published over 50 years ago, I expected the comfort of rediscovering an old friend. But Leopold’s impassioned plea to understand what we are doing to the planet, and his eloquent argument for a “land ethic,” remains as relevant today as the day it was written. And that’s heartbreaking.
An estimated 40,000 copies of SCA are sold each year, making it one of publishing’s most reliable cash-cows.* Yet somehow it still hasn’t been read by everyone who ought to have read it, in particular policy-makers, urban planners, anyone working in agriculture, and doctors (human health and land health are two sides of the same coin).
The first time I read Sand County, I was in the middle of shooting a television documentary on people / predator territorial disputes. Driving across Arizona to film a segment on the reintroduction of gray wolves in the Blue Mountains, a senior biologist from the National Wildlife Federation who was traveling with the crew began reciting from memory Leopold’s essay, “Thinking Like a Mountain”:
“ … In those days we never passed up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the whole pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks.
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean a hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view…
…I now suspect that just a deer lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.
…Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wilderness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of a wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men....”
I was hooked. We stopped for the night in a small town with the only bookstore for hundreds of miles around, and the only copy of Sand County Almanac for probably hundreds more.
The book is split into three sections: The first is the Almanac itself, covering 12 months on and around a dust-bowl ravaged “sand farm” in central Wisconsin that Leopold and his remarkable family set about restoring during the 1930s. They planted thousands of pine trees, restored prairie, and made a home out of a former chicken coop (“The Shack”). Leopold documentedit all, from tiny prairie flowers and chickadees, to the migrations of geese and the history written in the growth rings of an old oak, with riveting and often poetic detail.
Today, you can visit the farm, which is now the Aldo Leopold Foundation, just outside of Baraboo (reservation required; Baraboo is also home to The International Crane Foundation, Circus World Museum and Boo Canoe – it’s quite an amazing place). Those seedling pines now tower over The Shack. In fact, recently some of the trees were taken down to preserve the health of a thriving forest. Their wood is being used to build the new Leopold Legacy Center.
Rereading the Almanac made me long to be in a place where I could sit, watch and listen and see nothing but wild in all directions.
The second section is a series of essays – the “Sketches Here and There” – about ecological connections: Wolf, deer and mountain. Glacier, marsh, drainage canal and farm. Cattle, cheatgrass and fire. Even molecules traveling from rock through plant and animal to sea.
It is also about where humans fit in the scheme of things:
“It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.”
Finally, part three, “The Upshot,” is where Leopold builds his case for a land ethic:
“All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a place to compete for).
The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
This sounds simple: do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter downriver. Certainly not the waters, which we assume have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off sewage. Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate whole communities without batting an eye. Certainly not the animals, of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species. A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these ‘resources,’ but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state.
In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.”
Is there still time? The news lately hasn’t been good: a changing climate triggering floods, droughts and fires; massive marine dead zones caused by fertilizer run-off; the emergence of dozens of new plagues crippling and killing plants, animals and humans. Are we approaching an environmental tipping point, or have we already tipped?
Leopold’s message is about doing the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. Let us hope it is not too late.
- j.a.g.
* For those who have seen too many rejection letters, take heart. Leopold’s manuscript was turned down by several publishers before Oxford finally took it, releasing the book a year after his death.
