Not only did Aldo Leopold know what he was talking about, but he also knew how to say it. There are several books that have significantly shaped the way I see the natural world, and this skinny book has done some heavy lifting. Not once but several times.
While on a road trip in the summer of 2022, I dragged my wife an hour or two out of the way to stop at Leopold’s sand farm in Baraboo, Wisconsin to see the shack where A Sand County Almanac was born. I did not take off my shoes as we approached. The shack was still there, pickled away and made into a monument by some well-meaning organization. Unfortunately, all of Leopold’s pines and all of Leopold’s oaks could not put him back together again.
“It’s a renovated chicken coop.” I say to my wife.
“That’s exactly what it looks like to me.” She replies.
I could imagine the dignified professor Leopold emerging from his shack at 3:30 a.m., with a notebook in one hand, a coffeepot in the other, and a coffee cup in his shirt pocket, just to listen to birds (p. 40). Or I can imagine Leopold doing his “economic pondering lying prone on the sand, with Draba at nose-length” (p. 96). Scenes like this make Almanac lose all of its pretension. Like Thoreau eating the woodchuck, the earthiness in the midst of a such rich idea brings it home.
Leopold died from a heart attack on April 21, 1948, exactly one week after he received word that Oxford University Press had accepted his book for publication. He would never live to see his book translated into fourteen languages and sell more than two million copies. Certainly, he would not have known that his book would become manifesto for such a diverse group of land stewards: Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, Joel Salatin, David Kline, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. Even anti-hunting environmentalists find this book to hold uncommon sense.
How could one book carry so many layers? I read the book first for its nature writing, second as a new landowner trying to steward his land, and third as a writer trying to reverse-engineer the prose. The people who know about making books say “a book for everyone is a book for no one,” but somehow, Leopold has thrown this one in their teeth and made his book for everyone.
David Kline told me this story of when he first laid hands on A Sand County Almanac. He had gone with his parents to Wooster, Ohio to the dentist. While he waited on his parents, he walked down to the corner bookstore and there purchased his first copy of Almanac. The following day, he and his father were plowing. While resting his team of horses at the end of the furrow, Kline would pull the book from his coat front and read. Kline was a young man then, in his early teens. He was never the same again.
And, while we have a teenager sneaking bits from the book between furrows, a few universities have adopted Almanac into their curriculum to teach English. In both places, the book is perfectly at home.
Leopold repeatedly uses a literary metaphor when referring to people relating to the land, which implies a kind of sylvan literacy. Fires “write the history of conservation into the land.” Geese drop “wild poems from the…sky.” A collection of driftwood is an “anthology,” a kind of literature “not yet taught on campuses.”
The metaphor is good. Words are almost indestructible; once formed into a sentence, they can be forgotten or misremembered, but hardly destroyed because the idea set forth by the words survives out there somewhere in never-never land. Our position in the land is similar. Every little action perpetrated on the land by its inhabitants is not forgotten by it, but stored away in the vast memory of the biota. Our name might be forgotten, our actions forgiven, but our legacy lives on—unseen and unfelt, perhaps—but present nevertheless. We write our autobiographies into the earth. Like the heaps of old refrigerators, mattress springs, and tires in the gullies of my Kentucky farm, the farmer who owned this place before my father left an exact portrait of his character.
“Man brings all things to the test of himself,” Leopold writes about lightning striking the old oak, and this is an economic measure Leopold takes to task. Like the demigod Odysseus of Greece, he says, who hung six of his slave girls with a single rope, it is possible to see the flora not as existing as something of its own value but as a substance at the mercy of expediency and propriety. To the idea that everything must finally answer to the bank ledger, Leopold says:
“[Q]uit thinking about land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is both ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” (My emphasis.)
Take a close look at the word biotic. There is weight pivoting on the word. It is a that word can be taken across a wide spectrum of living things without losing its importance. Was it not an “economic problem” that first made slavery justifiable? Is it not “economic expediency” that allows farmers winter bare fields? Is it not “efficient” to flush toxic waste down the Mississippi to create a dead zone in the gulf? Our disrespect for the “biotic” community that allowed the chattel slavery of the nineteenth century is the same disrespect that allows us to exterminate portions of the biota we happen to not care about. It is only disrespect on a different scale. Where is the threshold between disrespecting our natural resources or disrespecting people enough to force them to slavery?
Somehow, without soapboxing and almost with flair, Leopold raises this awareness that there is no good threshold; it is the same problem. As closely as I can tell by analyzing his writing style, Leopold achieves this with a blend of humility, hope, and unwillingness to lapse into a jeremiad. Leopold uses almost no negative statements or generalizations that would indict swaths of the populations. Rather, he merely outlines the problems in concrete, vivid style, and then writes with the joy of a man who loves his subject. And by this, we cannot help but lay our own values beside his and see how they compare.
A Sand County Almanac is futuristic without hating the past, using the wisdom of history to establish hope for the future. It combines a trust in science with a daily pragmatism, a boundless affection for nature without devolving into pantheism. Leopold himself is a complicated mix of a man who kills the animals he loves, but works for their conservation, a man who realizes the intricate connection of man to nature; the realization that to withdraw and stop killing may isolate us more than ever.
He writes on the assumption that he is not the sole account-holder of nature, but merely the heir that will someday be a benefactor. And through it all, there is the clean, educated voice of the professor, who knows more than he is saying. Almanac is a book underpinned with the accuracy of science, shored with ethical philosophy, and written in poetry. This has made it both timeless and ahead of its time.
My wife and I take a short walk over to where the “Good Oak” stood that served as the base for that wonderful essay of the same name, then down to the river, running low and tame now since the dams. No more being stranded here of a Monday morning, which Leopold would note with “inner glee but exterior detachment.” Such are the losses of progressivism: No excuse not to be at work.
Cranes. Lots of Sandhills in the fields close by, and Leopold would be thrilled, methinks, to know his cranes are back. The first few paragraphs of his essay “Marshland Elegy” are, in my opinion, among the finest nature writing. One almost can’t help himself but love cranes by the end of it.
At the visitors center, Leopold’s Winchester model 1894 .30 caliber rifle is leaned up in a glass case, the same rifle he used to kill the wolf in his essay “Thinking Like a Mountain,” an experience that led him to a more complete view of conservation. His 20-gauge Fox was also there that he bought in 1921 as a young married man for $175—which would be around $2,300 today—surely an indulgence for a young married man. I nonchalantly point this out to my wife. She smiles indulgently and makes no comment. She has seen that one coming from afar.
Before I leave, I eye a copy of Curt Meine’s biography of Leopold, but it is thirty dollars, so I buy a new copy of Almanac. My old copy is falling apart at the spine. As we travel across the cornfield of Wisconsin, my wife drives while I read the essay “Good Oak” aloud.
Rest! cries the chief sawyer, and we pause for breath.