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 quickly apparent, his book does not cry out in defense of particular tracts of land about to go under the axe or plow, but preferably deals with the minutiae, the details, of often unnoticed plants and animals, all the little things that, in our ignorance, we have left out of our managed acreages but which must be present to add up to equilibrate ecosystems and a sense of quality and wholeness in the landscape. Part I of A Sand County Almanac is devoted to the details of a single ready 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 shovel and axe, what we are losing elsewhere. Month by month, Leopold leads the reader through the progression of the seasons with descriptions of su ch things as skunk tracks, mouse economics, the songs, habits, and attitudes of oodles of bird species, cycles of high water 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 telephone to the Iowa of his boyhood...