Only once in a while does a book come along that makes a difference. Rarer still is a book able to withstand the test of time. “A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There” by naturalist Aldo Leopold has managed to do both.
In fact, this slim volume of essays sells more copies today than it did when it was first published in October of 1949. Over the last 50 years, nearly 2.5 million copies have been sold, making it one of the best selling books ever.
Yet Leopold is not nearly as well known to the general public as John Muir, Henry Thoreau or Rachel Carson. On the other hand, scratch the green surface of just about anyone working in conservation today and you will find someone whose life has been touched, if not changed, by reading his work.
Leopold helped redefine our understanding of the natural world and provided much of the foundation for the modern environmental movement. His legacy can be seen everywhere: from the recovery of the Bald Eagle and the reintroduction of wolves in the Western states, to sustainable agriculture, wetland restoration and even the planting of decorative prairie grasses on the medians of Michigan Avenue.
“Look back on all the great books in conservation,” says Leopold biographer and wildlife biologist Curt Meine. “Why does Leopold still sell 20,000 to 30,000 copies a year? Because he tempered the seriousness of the message, which was profoundly inspiring — and, to some, profoundly challenging — with humor and storytelling. He was a scientist with a poet’s touch, a poet with a scientist’s insight, and that’s what’s kept it relevant.
“For the past 15 years, Leopold has been probably the most quoted figure in the conservation movement,” says Meine, noting his influence is felt more today than during his lifetime. Considering what a towering figure Leopold was during that lifetime, those are serious words indeed.
Among the highlights: He was a pioneer in the effort to preserve wilderness areas (the nation’s first wilderness area in the Gila National Forest of Arizona was founded 75 years ago in large part due to his work) and instrumental in the founding of the Wildlife Society, the Wilderness Society and the National Wildlife Federation.
He also literally wrote the book on game management (“Game Management”) while virtually single-handedly creating the academic discipline of wildlife ecology.
But perhaps his proudest achievement was his family — his beloved wife Estella and their five kids, who all just happened to grow up to be accomplished scientists and conservationists in their own right.
Leopold’s eldest daughter, Nina, an ecologist, and son-in-law Charles Bradley, a geologist and former Leopold student, run the Aldo Leopold Foundation Inc. out of their home in Baraboo near the Wisconsin River, just up the road from the famous “Shack” on the “sand” farm that figures so prominently in “A Sand County Almanac.”
“I think the most important thing that shaped our lives was the relationship between Mother and Dad,” Nina reflects. “My feeling is that Dad could never have been free to think as deeply as he did if he had had frustrations in his marriage. . . . The second most important thing is that Dad and Mother went to The Shack every Friday afternoon after work and came back on Sunday night. That means we had two full days alone with our parents and our friends and our siblings. . . . We had time to work together. To talk together. To be quiet together. To sing together. This is precious.”
In the winter of 1935, Leopold, then a professor at the University of Wisconsin, took his family to see The Shack — actually a chicken coop — and the 80-acre, worn out farm that surrounded it for the first time. While it was cheap enough at $8 per acre, it certainly didn’t look all that promising. For Leopold, though, this farm was perfect precisely because it was in such disastrous shape. What better place to try out ideas on restoration and land health?
The family took it on faith that Dad knew what the heck he was doing. Over the next several summers they planted tens of thousands of young pines, 90 percent of which died, withered by Dust Bowl-era droughts, yet they kept at it until finally it worked. Today, those trees stand 60 feet tall and form a phalanx around the tiny, white-washed Shack that still serves as a retreat for a select few, from family and college interns to Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt and Forest Service Chief Michael Dombeck.
If there is a ground zero in the conservation world, a holy place, a mecca, it might well be The Shack. Called “the most famous chicken coop in the world,” it is actually listed on the National Register of Historic Places — but unless you count the fabulously temperamental fireplace, clearly it is not for any extraordinary architectural achievement.
Leopold would rise before dawn to walk the land with his dog, or simply sit outside with a Thermos of coffee and observe. Here thoughts and ideas that took a lifetime to mature crystallized into what would become “A Sand County Almanac.”
The “Almanac,” a series of 22 short essays following the months of the year — most of them set at the farm — is actually just the first of the book’s three sections. “January Thaw” begins the cycle with the story of a skunk — or rather the story of a skunk’s tracks — and the imaginings of what the animal might be up to on a midwinter’s walk important enough to interrupt its hibernation slumbers.
“January observation can be almost as simple and peaceful as snow, and almost as continuous as cold. There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why,” wrote Leopold.
Over the next 2 1/2 pages, Leopold lays out the book’s major themes through a series of seemingly insignificant observations: a meadow mouse tunnel, a diving hawk and a tuft of rabbit hair lost in amorous battle. He finds the remarkable in the commonplace, revealing an unexpectedly complex world where life and death are intricately woven into the fabric of seasons, weather and geography.
It isn’t simply a matter of food chains but, as described in the book’s concluding essay, “The Land Ethic,” chains of energy, a living, breathing, pulsing system that extends well beyond the boundaries of the farm. On that January day, the chain extended from Baraboo to the Arctic, from whence a hawk, now dining contentedly on a meadow mouse in the Leopolds’ field, had just arrived.
Just as chains of life are not limited by space, neither are they limited by time. In “Good Oak” Leopold travels back 80 years through the growth rings of a tree as it’s cut down for firewood, describing events both natural and political that shaped the surrounding landscape. In “Odyssey,” he takes things even further, following the path of an atom called “X” as it works its way from rock to root and through several cycles on the prairie food chain before eventually finding its way to sea. Atom “Y,” liberated post-settlement when an ox team plowed prairie into a wheat field, took only 100 years to make the trip downstream in a terrain weakened by short-sighted farming practices.
While Leopold’s essays never lose their gentle tone or sense of wonder, his message becomes progressively more forceful: At the end of the day, everything depends on the health of the land. Ideas we take almost for granted as common sense such as wilderness preservation, land stewardship and the importance of predators represented a new way of thinking in the 1930s and ’40s.
It wasn’t so much that Leopold was ahead of the pack as that he cleared the path for the pack to follow.
It was a path that he had to clear for himself as well. Raised in 1890s rural Burlington, Iowa, Leopold grew up with a love of nature, tramping through forests, bird-watching and hunting. He graduated from the Yale Forestry School in 1909, then went to work for the U.S. Forest Service in Arizona and New Mexico for the next 15 years.
He moved to Madison, first to take a job in the service’s Forest Products lab, then as a consultant on wild game and eventually to develop a wildlife conservation curriculum at the University of Wisconsin.
When Leopold began his career, forests and game were considered commodities to be managed and harvested for public profit. Anything that might harm the “product,” be it wildfires or wolves, was treated as an enemy that needed to be stamped out. After years of work in the field, Leopold was among the first to reconsider that approach.
In “Thinking Like a Mountain,” one of his most famous essays, Leopold recalls watching a “fierce green fire” die slowly from the eyes of a wolf he had shot. “I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise,” he writes. “But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”
He watches as the mountain becomes stripped of vegetation and deer herds starve in a world without wolves to keep their numbers in check. Leopold then takes on ranchers, rebuking a cowman for letting livestock overgraze land. “He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.”
“A Sand County Almanac” did not become a best seller until the late 1960s, when the environmental movement gained momentum. In fact, several publishers, including Knopf and Macmillan, rejected the manuscript before Oxford signed on (as it happened just a week before Leopold’s untimely death fighting a fire on a neighbor’s farm).
Today it has become a standard text in college conservation classes. Like atom “X,” Leopold’s ideas continue to filter through the food chain as students graduate to become teachers, activists and policymakers.
It is these students who are perhaps Leopold’s most enduring legacy, for over the years they have turned his thoughts into actions. In the face of daunting odds — urban sprawl, acid rain, global warming — there are victories. Wolves once again howl in Yellowstone and salmon are making a comeback on the Kennebec River in Maine now that a dam has been breached.
Closer to home in the Chicago area, hundreds of volunteers work on prairie and wetland restorations and “weeds” like purple prairie cone flowers now show up in all the best gardens. In these ways and so many more, Leopold’s fierce green fire continues to burn.
EXCERPTS FROM `SAND COUNTY’
Excerpts from “A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There:”
From “Thinking Like a Mountain”:
“In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks.
“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes — something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”
From “The Land Ethic”:
“All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively: the land. . . . In short, a land ethic changes the role of homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.”
TWO BOOKS CELEBRATE ANNIVERSARY
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of “A Sand County Almanac,” two books were published this fall. “For the Health of the Land,” edited by J. Baird Callicott and Eric Freyfogle (Island Press), features 40 essays by Leopold, many previously unpublished.
“The Essential Aldo Leopold,” edited by Curt Meine and Richard Knight (University of Wisconsin Press), is a mix of Leopold quotes and commentaries by a who’s who of nature writers and conservationists.
One of the biggest conservation conferences in a long time, “Building on Leopold’s Legacy: Conservation for a New Century,” was hosted by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, in Madison in early October.
The Leopold Foundation (608-355-0279) sponsors a variety of programs and internships, while the Leopold Education Project (651-773-2000 or www.lep.org.) provides workshops and support materials for middle and high school educators on a “A Sand County Almanac.”
