A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. By land is meant all of the things on, over, or in the earth. Harmony with the land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators, you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism. Its parts, like our own parts, compete with each other and co-operate with each other. The competitions are as much a part of the inner workings as the co-operations. You can regulate them--cautiously--but not abolish them.

Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac is one of those books that stands at the heart of the modern conservation movement. You might stretch it back further to Walden, but there is a kind of awakening in conservation--indeed, a kind of invention of the idea of conservation itself--that is invented in the mid-twentieth century, and A Sand County Almanac is one of its pillars, perhaps alongside only Silent Spring. It's interesting to read now, because much of what is there seems so familiar to us now, but I found there was a great deal in it that still felt fresh and invigorating. 

A Sand County Almanac is essentially named after the first of several parts. The first, titular section, is a series of essays that follow the months of the year at Leopold's humble farm in "Sand County," which is really the area around Madison, Wisconsin. The fields flood, the birds retreat and return, ice and snow form, wildflowers grow and die. The pleasure of this section is like the pleasure of exploring a landscape with someone who knows it very well, down to the smallest organism, and who knows moreover how that organism fits into the whole. One of the most impressive things about it is Leopold's ability to narrate backward from the state of a landscape: what assemblages of plants and animals indicate clear-cutting, or flooding, or different kinds of farming and harvesting. One of the most fascinating moments, in fact, is when he describes sawing down an old lightning-blasted tree, going through each ring and describing what was happening in the landscape of Wisconsin at that time, back hundreds of years. It's a nice reminder that history is more than just human history, that the landscape, too, has its own history, and it's a history that is legible to those who know how to read it.

The next section, "The Quality of Landscape," is arranged geographically, rather than annually, and takes the reader through a series of well-observed vignettes from Wisconsin to Iowa and Illinois, all the way down to New Mexico and Arizona, where Leopold was a forester who helped establish the Gila Wilderness, and even into Chihuahua and Sonora. But the most interesting stuff in the whole book, I thought, were the more polemic essays that come after, where Leopold lays down his theories of conservation, including the idea of a "land ethic." Leopold, a believer in progress, argues that human history is an exercise in developing superior ethics, that move from nationalism into democratic equality, and that the next necessary ethic that man must develop is a "land ethic" in which he recognizes himself as part of a larger ecosystem. Probably Leopold would be outraged by much of what we've done to the earth (how hard it is to read these old conservationists who had no idea what were doing to the climate), but I wonder if he'd see this as an idea that's been easily and widely accepted. Of course, we have our reactionaries, and they're definitely in charge right now, but it's crazy to read A Sand County Almanac and understand just how little purchase this kind of thinking really had.

For Leopold, exercising this "land ethic" begins with cultivating the kind of visual acuity and sensitivity that's so impressive in the first part of the book. "Like all real treasures of the mind," he writes, "perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring the South Seas. Perception, in short, cannot be purchased with either learned degrees or dollars; it grows at home as well as abroad, and he who has a little may use it to as good advantage as he who has much." Good words worth remembeiring.