Book Review: A Sand County Almanac
A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River - Aldo Leopold 1986, Random House Publishing co.
★★★★★ (5/5) A foundational environmentalist work.
This book was recommended to me by a close personal friend as one of their favorite reads, and I'm very glad they did. It definitely proved to be a pivotal read. I've been slowly working on reading this book since about January, partially because I tend to read several books at once and partially because there was much for me to think about while reading it.
The book itself is not difficult, or at least, the Almanac section for the most part isn't. In fact I would say it's very charming, sometimes almost storybook-esque, and Leopold manages to convey a shocking amount of tenderness and humor even to a modern reader. The essays, which make up about the latter quarter of the book, are comparatively dense and difficult, but also by far the most pertinent. The book is divided into four parts: A Sand County Almanac, The Quality of Landscape, A Taste for Country, and The Upshot. They are all very unique, so I think it's easiest to cover them one by one.
A Sand County Almanac is exactly what it says on the tin. It describes various mundane natural events over the course of the year on Leopold's farm in Wisconsin, and woven through these charming narratives are (comparatively) light narratives on the history and exploitation of that area, and similar events in other places. Leopold has a palpable passion for the natural beauty of his home and has captured it beautifully, sometimes drawing tears and other times prompting heartfelt laughter. Initially I was at times put off by how Leopold seems to blame "progress" for land exploitation, or seemed to imply that conservation and "progress" are mutually exclusive. But as I went deeper into it, it became apparent that he in fact means nothing of the sort, and this forced me to consider my relationship with language and means of interpreting environmentalist messages considerably. More on that in a bit though.
The second part, The Quality of Landscape, has proven least memorable in the long term, but not for lack of intrigue. Leopold's prose is extremely admirable, his knowledge of land and its history even more so, and the environmentalist and conservationist messages that he supports with the prose are still extremely current. But they are ones that I and many other contemporary environmentalists would probably already be familiar with. I think reading the Almanac and its ecological messages set me up to read the second part of the book with a very active frame of mind and a keen eye for conservationist reasoning. The decently slow-paced and mostly prosaic construction of the second part made it less memorable to the current version of me for that reason, but I deeply enjoyed reading it nonetheless and, importantly, it has added some travel desires and valuable American history perspectives to my life.
The third and fourth parts, A Taste for Country and The Upshot, I think proved my favorites. These two are treated like something of an afterthought on the cover, the main focus being on the almanac, but his essays on conservation and human relationships with the land struck me deeply. Aldo Leopold was a founding father of environmentalism and conservation as we know it, and it is more than moving to read essays from upwards of 70 years ago that seem wholly ahead of current day environmentalism. The essays are much more dense than the rest of the book, and wildly vary in tone (A Man's Leisure Time being almost satirical, whereas The Land Ethic comes across highly sensitive), but come together to convey a very coherent and developed, and current, perspective on not only modern western relationships with land, but also what steps we need to undertake to solve our problems therein. It's a painful reminder that the tools we need for a revolution and the plans on how to stage it have been among us for decades, not yet enacted or honored.
In other ways the book is of course extremely dated (having been written before his death in 1948), but these disappear into the background for the most part. There is some unfortunate and outdated language use, mostly when referring to Indigenous people of the Americas, but it is also obvious that there is no derisive tone intended - in fact I think his acknowledgment of Indigenous Americans as indigenous and better related to the land is leagues ahead of much other literature of the time. Other loaded words also appear: civilization, et cetera. You must think of that what you must, and be highly critical of such language, but in the case of this book I think qualms with that kind of language shouldn't get in the way of understanding and acknowledging the broader message, which blessedly is not supported by any notions of 'civilization' or other such terms. In fact, toward the end of the book I made an annotation so long it required a separate piece of paper to be jammed between the pages:
Side thought: I was gonna put quotation marks around Arctic "wastes" because I thought that word, though frequently used, stood contrary to his message. But I stopped myself because realistically, anyone with reading comprehension would understand he does not think of them as wastes. [...] Is how the modern left treats & polices language a trauma response? Why do we seek to heavily codify and flatten language rather than promoting literacy, comprehension, and empathetic discussion?
Transliterated from my scribbles, lol
Another thing that significantly dates the book is just how broad Leopold's vocabulary truly is. For a contemporary reader, especially one not as practiced in reading dated language, it could be difficult to get through - which is why I might encourage anyone who is interested in his perspectives but quickly drained by complicated language to prioritize reading his essays over his prose. The essays get the broader message across in more detail and more concisely.
Leopold does an amazing job linking land back to people, something that modern day environmentalism and ecology is still largely failing at. He understands and emphasizes the relationships between land and social functions and culture, and unlike many books with environmentalist messaging, never falls into the trap of portraying mankind as a scourge upon the earth rather than a part of nature like any other animal.
All in all, A Sand County Almanac is a sobering and sensitive, and deeply personal book written by somebody who has contributed more to the movement than words can describe. And, as a bonus, this edition has beautiful illustrations that will inspire me for a while to come.
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.
-- Aldo Leopold
