I had heard of Aldo Leopold and this book for many years. It seems like one of the cornerstones to modern thought about environmentalism. So, when the SciFri Book Club chose it to read for November 2024 I jumped at the chance to finally read it.

The first part of the book is, as the title implies, a calendar of observations around his cottage in central Wisconsin. He called this area Sand County because it had been devastated by logging and agriculture until it was essentially just sand. Leopold set about restoring the original habitat of the area which had been woodland/forest. He had come to view man's degradation of the environment as unethical and he developed what he called a "land ethic". The following quote epitomizes his thinking "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. " He wrote many other papers and essays besides The Sand County Almanac many of which are collected in this book. One surprise for me was the chapter he entitled Manitoba. One of his students came to Manitoba and established the Delta Marsh Waterfowl Research Station in 1938. Leopold came several times to help with this work. It's quite a famous spot in Manitoba but I had never heard about Aldo Leopold's involvement.

Leopold was a man before his time. Many of his ideas about environmentalism are still useful today because it seems people have not embraced the land ethic. ( )

I greatly appreciated the Library of America’s edition of Leopold: A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation for how it provides such great context about Leopold, what formed him, and how and why he developed the land ethic.

The land ethic is Aldo Leopold’s great contribution to conservation and the world writ large: by means of his experiences as a hunter, wildlife observer, and forestry manager, he learned to appreciate the whole of an ecosystem. In a time in which apex predators were killed without much regard he recognized their loss would lead to disruption and then degradation of the whole environment. He firsthand saw the effects of broad grazing policies and was quite startled at the difference between similar ecosystems across the United States / Mexico border. Thus he encouraged every stakeholder, from the farmer to the hunter to the industrialist, to see and appreciate the land as a whole, and not just the sum of its parts.

Leopold sets out the land ethic in A Sand County Almanac. But to just dive into A Sand County Almanac will feel rather disorienting. I ended up reading this edition in the order presented but would highly recommend for other readers to consider it in the following order: the chronology presented at the end, then his letters, then his journals, and then finally A Sand County Almanac and then the collection of his other writings.

Why? From the chronology, letters, and journals you get a much better feel for Leopold the human being and his trajectory. You can better triangulate him, since he is a man of varied experiences: growing up in the Midwest, getting advanced schooling on the East Coast, working in the Southwest, and ending up back in the Midwest as the nation’s first professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

And then A Sand County Almanac, and how it is structured, makes a bit more sense. You first get introduced to Leopold the astute observer of wildlife and plant life and their symbiotic relationships. Some of his experiences in other places are introduced. And thus his land ethic makes better sense when you see how it flows from all he observed and experienced.

My bitter lament is how Leopold’s land ethic has been around for seventy-five years, is quite well known, and, if anything, has only been further buttressed by discoveries and developments in the intervening seventy-five years, and yet we collectively seem no closer to appreciating ecosystems as a whole now than they were then. It seems our trajectory overall is not as dire as Leopold had every right to expect based on how things had been going in the land for over a hundred and fifty years, so there’s that. But the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker has gone the way of the Passenger Pigeon and Carolina Parakeet. We’re still degrading land everywhere because of insistence on grazing rights and livestock, degrading farming methods, and industrial production over the health of the environment. It’s not like we aren’t receiving more evidence every day of the immense costs we are currently bearing because of these decisions, and the exponentially higher costs which our descendants will bear. And yet we persist.

Nevertheless, please do check out Leopold. I recommend the Library of America edition, but there is a lot more reading involved than in just picking up a copy of A Sand County Almanac. It is beyond time for us to uphold a more robust land ethic. ( )

A collection of writings from one of the first public conservationists. The collection starts out with A Sand County Almanac, which was a fun and easy re-read. Then there is a section of journal articles, which is a bit more technical, then entries in his journal, mostly records of hunting trips, finished by a short selection of his letters. The work spans a four decade period, and you can see the evolution of a conservationist, moving from being a supporter of predator removal and fire suppression to understanding the overall impact of these policies and speaking against them. There are some facets of the book that speak to a certain naivete on the part of the author when viewed from the standpoint of seven decades later, but he was at the beginning point of what we now know as the environmental movement. The science was still in the maiden stages, and the evolution of ecology itself can be seen in this work. I wish our sustainability coordinator would read this book; perhaps she would then be able to understand that the move toward sustainability was not one sudden giant leap of the gen-xrs, but was a long process that involved a lot of groundwork and spanned more than a century. ( )