Book Review: A Sand County Almanac

As you may recall, one of my great (and rather unexpected) reading loves is that of the agricultural writer, an author that writes of farming and land use and using older ways and asking questions about our relationship with the land and (frankly) returning to a stable rural economy.  My great model for this, of course, is the late Gene Logsdon (his book A Contrary Farmer's) was what hooked me on the genre in the first place.  Ever since then I have looked and added to my collection.  Some authors - for example David Mas Matsumoto (Epitaph for a Peach:  Four Seasons on My Family Farm) - are lyrical but do not strike a chord with me.  Others - Wendell Berry and Joel Salatin - are enjoyable but sometimes too strident in their politics.  A few - Sepp Holzer (Permaculture), John Lewis-Stempel (The Running Hare), Masanobu Fukuoka (The One Straw Revolution) - I do not have enough of their other works to judge - or perhaps, having read the work I listed which was so good, I fear to read another lest I am disappointed (To date, only Logsdon is the author that reliably produces for me time after time).

So it was with interest that I received a recommendation from a friend of a similar sort of book A Sand County Almanac And Sketches Here And There by Aldo Leopold.  For my friend, it was the book that had finally convinced him to ditch the city life and move out to the country.  Obviously, a book to take note of.

From the back cover:  "Aldo Leopold was born in Iowa in 1887.  His professional career began in 1909, when he joined the U.S. Forest Service.  In 1924  he become Associate Director of the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin; and in 1933 the University of Wisconsin created a chair of game management for him.  He died in 1948, fighting a grass fire on a neighbor's farm, shortly after he had become an advisor on conservation to the United Nations." 

The book is divided into three sections parts.  The first, A Sand County Almanac, is literally an almanac:  an observational diary of the land he lives on in Sand County, Wisconsin.  Interestingly, Leopold does not seem to be a farmer (although he lives on a farm) but is (a rarity these days) a writer that hunted and fished and so his descriptions are written with the observer's eye for detail and the hunter's eye for finding clues:

"No prudent man would risk a dollar's worth of fly and leader pulling a trout upstream through the giant tooth-brush of alder stems comprising the bend of that creek.  But as I said, no prudent man is a fisherman.  By and by, with much cautious unraveling, I got him up into open water, and finally aboard the creel."

"During every week from April to September there are, on average, ten wild plants coming into first bloom.  In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day.  No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.  He who steps unseeing on May dandelions may be hauled up short by August ragweed pollen; he ignores the ruddy haze of April elms may skid his car on the fallen corollas of June catalpas.  Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his fever, and the general level of his ecological education."

In the section his description of sawing down a 80 year old oak, counting the years as the cut the rings, may itself be cause to buy the book.

The second part is called Sketches Here and There and are Leopold's observations on various areas of wilderness he has traveled:  Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa, Arizona and New Mexico, Chihuahua and Sonora, Oregon and Utah, Manitoba.  These were interesting to me because of when he is writing, he describes these areas as one step away from the wilderness they were unlike the less wild and more developed places they have become.

Describing Lightning in Arizona:  "The explosions are fearful enough, but more so are the smoking slivers of stone that sing past your ear when the bolt crashes into a rimrock.  Still more so are the splinters that fly when a bolt explodes a pine.  I remember one gleaming white one, 15 feet long, that stabbed deep into the earth at my feet and stood there humming like a tuning fork.

It must be a poor life that achieves freedom from fear."

"Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we pioneers have killed our wilderness.  Some say we had to.  Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in.  Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?"

The third part, The Upshot, is Leopold's synthesis of his experiences and his beliefs.  He calls for what he names "The Conservation Ethic", a sort of acknowledged agreement between people and the land that calls for management, not for over utilization.  He is dismissive of the increased (even in his day) "Mechanization" of outdoor activities which destroy the value of the outdoors themselves:

"If we regard outdoor sports as a field of conflict between an immensely vigorous process of mechanization and a wholly static tradition, then the outlook for cultural values is indeed dark.  But why cannot our concept of sport grow with the same vigor as our list of gadgets?  Perhaps the salvation of cultural value lies in seizing the offensive.  I, for one, believe the time is ripe.  Sportsman can determine for themselves the shape of things to come. 

The last decade, for example, has disclosed a totally new form of sport, which does not destroy wildlife, which uses gadgets without being used by them, which outflanks the problems of posted land, and which greatly increases the human carrying capacity of a unit area.  This sport knows no bag limit, no closed season. It needs teachers, but not wardens.  It calls for a new woodcraft of the highest value.  The sport I refer to is wildlife research."

His "land ethic" (he goes in to much greater detail) seems to be a bridge between environmentalism as it is practiced today and a social education and sense of what the land is and why it is valuable inherently as wild land.

I am ambivalent about this book.  His writings and observations are lyrical and some of them are indeed worth the purchase of the book.  The part that has me somewhat hesitant about fully recommending it is some of the implications of his idea of a "land ethic" - not that the idea is bad, but that I have seen his methodology work out in practical ways (he was writing in the early 1940's after a lifetime of working only in government and educational service).  He saw land from a management and use as a sportsman standpoint, not from the standpoint of someone like a farmer or husbandmen or forester who lives on the land and uses it for purpose and in many cases is more in tune with and caring of the land than a governmental authority could ever be.  Leopold sees only social approbation and government as the vehicle for making this happen (I have seen this worked out practically in my own home state, when the smelt overcame the farmers and the owl overcame the loggers).  Rather than arguing for sensible use, he argues for uses which preserve his concept of what is appropriate - to be fair, he is often discussing the preservation of wilderness as wilderness but does not make the distinction well between wilderness and land which is being used.

So I would recommend it for the descriptions.  Be ready to be thoughtfully challenged (he is never incendiary in language) and to at least give a greater consideration to what a sensible land use policy and preservation policy means to you.