First published in 1949 and praised in The New York Times Book Review as a trenchant book, full of vigor and bite, A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for Americas relationship to the land. Written with an unparalleled understanding of the ways of nature, the book includes a section on the monthly changes of the Wisconsin countryside; another part that gathers informal pieces written by Leopold over a forty-year period as he traveled through the woodlands of Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona, Sonora, Oregon, Manitoba, and elsewhere; and a final section in which Leopold addresses the philosophical issues involved in wildlife conservation. As the forerunner of such important books as Annie Dillards Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Edward Abbeys Desert Solitaire, and Robert Finchs The Primal Place, this classic work remains as relevant today as it was forty years …
First published in 1949 and praised in The New York Times Book Review as a trenchant book, full of vigor and bite, A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for Americas relationship to the land. Written with an unparalleled understanding of the ways of nature, the book includes a section on the monthly changes of the Wisconsin countryside; another part that gathers informal pieces written by Leopold over a forty-year period as he traveled through the woodlands of Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona, Sonora, Oregon, Manitoba, and elsewhere; and a final section in which Leopold addresses the philosophical issues involved in wildlife conservation. As the forerunner of such important books as Annie Dillards Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Edward Abbeys Desert Solitaire, and Robert Finchs The Primal Place, this classic work remains as relevant today as it was forty years ago.
Central Wisconsin marsh and woods and fowl, how the land changed and is changing in the 40s and 50s. Some travel and larger world observations but mostly a close loving look at a small environment.
Very nice. Must have seemed radical at the time it was written. This book is called "A Sand County Almanac", I don't know why the title is screwed up in Goodreads.
I had been meaning to read this for a while, since it's such a sacred text to the environmental community and it didn't disappoint. It's really a compilation of Leopold's essays written over some years, in three parts:
The book starts with the actual sand county Almanac, which is a set of short observational essays representing one full year in the life of the farm he and his family retreated to on weekends. This was my favourite part of the book; above all else Leopold was a wonderful observer of nature and painter of scenes. There is some editorialising in this, but it's done with a rather light touch. More than anything else, it's a call to simply pay more attention to the rhythms of nature even as technology and urbanisation make it more and more possible to ignore them.
The middle part is a serious of descriptive and reflective …
I had been meaning to read this for a while, since it's such a sacred text to the environmental community and it didn't disappoint. It's really a compilation of Leopold's essays written over some years, in three parts:
The book starts with the actual sand county Almanac, which is a set of short observational essays representing one full year in the life of the farm he and his family retreated to on weekends. This was my favourite part of the book; above all else Leopold was a wonderful observer of nature and painter of scenes. There is some editorialising in this, but it's done with a rather light touch. More than anything else, it's a call to simply pay more attention to the rhythms of nature even as technology and urbanisation make it more and more possible to ignore them.
The middle part is a serious of descriptive and reflective essays written as Leopold travelled around North America. These are rather patchy, somewhat more editorial, and overwhelmingly sad. He had a very clear vision of what had already been lost to short-sighted overdevelopment, and how much more was on the cusp of being lost, and reading it 60-odd years later is actually quite upsetting. I like to tell myself that the destruction we've visited upon our own world was largely a product of ignorance, but essays like these are reminder of how untrue that is, at least for the "new world". We've had people calling this out for at least three generations, and yet we still have to fight the notion that nothing we do has any consequences.
The book closes with a set of much more prescriptive essays, about what should be done to halt the destruction. These made good for thought, but fall short of the perfection of his descriptive work. I found myself alternately agreeing, being made to think about concepts I hadn't considered before, and being frustrated by a few shortcomings:
- Leopold's vision doesn't scale to the size of population we have today. Perhaps in 1966 it would have worked to put brakes on urbanisation, but today we can't do that without turning entire continents into sprawling exurbia. I'm not sure if this was a blind spot of his at the time, or just something that hasn't translated to today.
- At times his focus on wilderness and emptiness is too narrow, and misses bigger systemic problems, such as the consequences of urban/suburban households all driving out to their dachas or the wilderness all the time. I suppose this is another instance of "does not scale".
- Sometimes he just seems indefinsibly optimistic about human nature, arguing that most if not all of the cultural change we need can come just from persuading people to intrinsically value nature. It makes sense that he should feel this way, since doing exactly that seems to be his greatest skill, but the faddishness of environmentalism since Leopold's time shows up the weakness of such an approach.
All in all, a great read - just take the polemical part with a pinch of salt, and consider the ways our collective experience since this was written critique it.
I had been meaning to read this for a while, since it's such a sacred text to the environmental community and it didn't disappoint. It's really a compilation of Leopold's essays written over some years, in three parts:
The book starts with the actual sand county Almanac, which is a set of short observational essays representing one full year in the life of the farm he and his family retreated to on weekends. This was my favourite part of the book; above all else Leopold was a wonderful observer of nature and painter of scenes. There is some editorialising in this, but it's done with a rather light touch. More than anything else, it's a call to simply pay more attention to the rhythms of nature even as technology and urbanisation make it more and more possible to ignore them.
The middle part is a serious of descriptive and reflective …
I had been meaning to read this for a while, since it's such a sacred text to the environmental community and it didn't disappoint. It's really a compilation of Leopold's essays written over some years, in three parts:
The book starts with the actual sand county Almanac, which is a set of short observational essays representing one full year in the life of the farm he and his family retreated to on weekends. This was my favourite part of the book; above all else Leopold was a wonderful observer of nature and painter of scenes. There is some editorialising in this, but it's done with a rather light touch. More than anything else, it's a call to simply pay more attention to the rhythms of nature even as technology and urbanisation make it more and more possible to ignore them.
The middle part is a serious of descriptive and reflective essays written as Leopold travelled around North America. These are rather patchy, somewhat more editorial, and overwhelmingly sad. He had a very clear vision of what had already been lost to short-sighted overdevelopment, and how much more was on the cusp of being lost, and reading it 60-odd years later is actually quite upsetting. I like to tell myself that the destruction we've visited upon our own world was largely a product of ignorance, but essays like these are reminder of how untrue that is, at least for the "new world". We've had people calling this out for at least three generations, and yet we still have to fight the notion that nothing we do has any consequences.
The book closes with a set of much more prescriptive essays, about what should be done to halt the destruction. These made good for thought, but fall short of the perfection of his descriptive work. I found myself alternately agreeing, being made to think about concepts I hadn't considered before, and being frustrated by a few shortcomings:
- Leopold's vision doesn't scale to the size of population we have today. Perhaps in 1966 it would have worked to put brakes on urbanisation, but today we can't do that without turning entire continents into sprawling exurbia. I'm not sure if this was a blind spot of his at the time, or just something that hasn't translated to today.
- At times his focus on wilderness and emptiness is too narrow, and misses bigger systemic problems, such as the consequences of urban/suburban households all driving out to their dachas or the wilderness all the time. I suppose this is another instance of "does not scale".
- Sometimes he just seems indefinsibly optimistic about human nature, arguing that most if not all of the cultural change we need can come just from persuading people to intrinsically value nature. It makes sense that he should feel this way, since doing exactly that seems to be his greatest skill, but the faddishness of environmentalism since Leopold's time shows up the weakness of such an approach.
All in all, a great read - just take the polemical part with a pinch of salt, and consider the ways our collective experience since this was written critique it.
