Humanity’s Relationship to Nature in Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac
Originally published in 1949, Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac is widely considered a classic of North American environmental literature. I can see why it deserves a place alongside Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) as a touchstone for many environmentalists, since this collection of essays is a lyrical portrait of nature across seasons and geographies as well as an impassioned argument for a renewed relationship between humanity and the more-than-human world.
Our discussion of the book ranged from sharing passages that resonated with us to tracing Leopold’s patterns of thought across multiple chapters to try and tease out particular themes. One of these is to see nature as a history book or as history itself (7–18, 27, 32, 50, 73, 86, 119, 171, 183, 241), with knowledge that people have long since stopped reading for. This is usually in the context of a loss of history as plants are cut down, their recording of
natural history (such as years of flood and drought) lost to us, such as the elimination of Silphium from the prairie (49–50). Leopold also makes explicit connection to humanity’s retreat from experiencing the land directly, which has led to a general loss of ecological knowledge and comprehension of the land, even (if not especially) in college courses such as “geography, botany, agronomy, history, or economics” (262). Education leads to loss of awareness (50 and 186).
Another thread running through the book is Leopold’s use of figurative language to convey the aesthetic qualities of nature, such as conceiving of the river as a painter and the sandbar his painting (54–56) or seeing theater in the dance of the male woodcock (32–36). He argues that nature provides the farmer with a “visual diet” that is twice as rich as that of “the university student or the businessman” based on a comparison of species that bloom on a farm compared to in the suburbs or on a university campus (51). One of the problems, though, is that human aesthetic sense is unable to distinguish between “rich country and mere land” (178), which is another major thread running through the book.
What may seem aesthetically pleasing to the human eye might actually indicate a failed biota. This confusion is symptomatic of the tension between ecology and economics. For Leopold, the insistence on viewing nature through an economic lens means that land is judged to have value only insofar as value can be extracted through farming or sale of timber. This has the perverse effect of labeling some areas “poor land” despite their value for maintaining a healthy ecosystem. Leopold illustrates this concept several times throughout the book, although perhaps most clearly in the “Marshland Elegy” section of his essay on Wisconsin, in which he describes the important role that marshland plays in supporting many species of plant and animal life as well as the health of the surrounding land (101–111). This is something that economists do not recognize as having value, and therefore on the basis of economic thinking and in the name of progress, the marshes were drained, leading to poorer crops in surrounding areas and more intractable prairie fires (107). By taking an anthropocentric approach to conservation, humanity destroys the balance that used to exist between “Man and beast, plant and soil” (106).
This expanded 1966 edition adds a fourth section to the original’s three, but rearranges and renames them into the following parts: Part I, named “A Sand County Almanac,” contains reminiscences of the seasons at his family’s sand farm in Wisconsin; Part II, “The Quality of Landscape,” relates various episodes from his life during the first half of the twentieth century but thematically focuses on conservation; Part III, “A Taste for Country,” is new to this edition, and contains seven essays previously published in the collection Round River (1953); Part IV (the third and final section of the 1949 edition), “The Upshot,” poses philosophical questions aimed at guiding the interested reader in how American society can correct its course. This section includes one of Leopold’s most frequently referenced essays, “The Land Ethic,” which is both philosophical discourse and call to action.
Additional resources
PBS. “A Sand County Almanac Revisited.” [Video; 16:38]. PBS Wisconsin Documentaries, 23 April 1989.
Stoll, Mark. “Consumer Capitalism and the Environment.” [Video; 25:40]. Environment and Society Portal. Presentation at the Rachel Carson Center, LMU Munich, 31 October 2019.
The Aldo Leopold Foundation. “The Land Ethic.” aldoleopold.org, n.d.
