Sand County Almanac
Ratings28
Average rating4.2
First published in 1949 and praised in The New York Times Book Review as a trenchant book, full of vigor and bite, A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for Americas relationship to the land. Written with an unparalleled understanding of the ways of nature, the book includes a section on the monthly changes of the Wisconsin countryside; another part that gathers informal pieces written by Leopold over a forty-year period as he traveled through the woodlands of Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona, Sonora, Oregon, Manitoba, and elsewhere; and a final section in which Leopold addresses the philosophical issues involved in wildlife conservation. As the forerunner of such important books as Annie Dillards Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Edward Abbeys Desert Solitaire, and Robert Finchs The Primal Place, this classic work remains as relevant today as it was forty years ago.
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I am currently reading this and it is magnificent.
Seriously, if you enjoy nature writing at all, I highly recommend this.
However, I just had to pause to commemorate this phrase featured in the almanac: “cold potato mathematics.”
What does that even mean? Can we ascribe other foods in various states of condition to school subjects?
Hot bacon history.
Lukewarm casserole catechism.
Warm soup PE.
Chilled fish geography.
Sorry, I'll carry on now.
Obviously this is a classic book for those who enjoy nature and environmental (activism) books. I found the prose funny by today's standards and some of his views contradictory to common beliefs in the modern environmentalism movement, but I enjoyed the book and would recommend it.
A Sand County Almanac is a collection of essays about nature written by author Aldo Leopold and compiled by his son after his death in 1949. Leopold considered the relationship of land to the people that live on it, the people who use it.
Leopold writes with a wry sense of humor, and he tends to look upon humans as doomed to always put self-interest above the interests of the natural world.
Here are some quotes from the book:
“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.“
“Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.”
“ I sit in happy meditation on my rock, pondering, while my line dries again, upon the ways of trout and men. How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time!”
“ Like other great landowners, I have tenants. They are negligent about rents, but very punctilious about tenures. Indeed at every daybreak from April to July they proclaim their boundaries to each other, and so acknowledge, at least by inference, their fiefdom to me.”
“ Getting up too early is a vice habitual in horned owls, stars, geese, and freight trains.”
“ I have read many definitions of what is a conservationist, and written not a few myself, but I suspect that the best one is written not with a pen, but with an axe. It is a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land.”
“ In October I like to walk among these blue plumes, rising straight and stalwart from the red carpet of dewberry leaves. I wonder whether they are aware of their state of well-being. I know only that I am.”
I can see why many people I know reread this book often.
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