Aldo Leopolds A Sand County Almanac Essay -- Aldo Leopold Sand County

Aldo Leopolds A Sand County Almanac Although Leopolds love of great expanses of wilderness is readily apparent, his book does not clapperclaw out in defense of particular tracts of land about to go under the axe or plow, but rather deals with the minutiae, the details, of often unnoticed plants and animals, either the little things that, in our ignorance, we have left out of our managed acreages but which must be present to add up to balanced ecosystems and a sense of character and wholeness in the landscape. Part I of A Sand County Almanac is devoted to the details of a single piece of land Leopolds 120-acre farmed-out farmstead in central Wisconsin, abandoned as a farm years before because of the poor soil from which the sand counties took their nickname. It was at this weekend retreat, Leopold says, that we try to rebuild, with excavator and axe, what we are losing elsewhere. Month by month, Leopold leads the reader through the progression of the seasons with descript ions of such things as skunk tracks, mouse economics, the songs, habits, and attitudes of dozens of bird species, cycles of high pissing in the river, the timely appearance and blooming of several plants, and the joys of cutting ones own firewood. In Part II of A Sand County Almanac, titled The Quality of Landscape, Leopold takes his reader away from the farm first into the surrounding Wisconsin countryside and then even farther, on an Illinois bus ride, a visit to the Iowa of his boyhood...