A Sand County Almanac: With Other Essays on Conservation from Round River

Aldo Leopold

Ballantine Books, 1970 - Nature - 269 pages

"We can place this book on the shelf that holds the writings of Thoreau and John Muir." San Francisco Chronicle

These astonishing portraits of the natural world explore the breathtaking diversity of the unspoiled American landscape -- the mountains and the prairies, the deserts and the coastlines. A stunning tribute to our land and a bold challenge to protect the world we love.

What people are saying

User Review -

I am shocked and appalled by the vehemently hateful banter from previous reviewers in the google community. It's both disheartening and impressive at the same time to see how some people can project their own misconceptions into a body of work as benign and unassuming as 'A Sand County Almanac'.
Having come from a Daoist family that escaped communist China, I can assure future readers that there is no hint of Marxism or threat to democracy in this book. Rather, it is simply a reflection of the observations of the famed father of American wilderness conservation whom died honorably as a firefighter.
Mr. Leopold's work is simply as the description describes a nonfiction account of his observations in the balance and harmony of nature over a number of decades. Why haters need to turn it into anything more than that, or even take offense to something this simple, is beyond me. 

User Review -

A Sand County Almanac is this man’s account his surroundings and his thoughts and reflections on the human intervention within this environ he calls nature. However peaceful it may sound, Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac is a cluttered work of non-fiction where the author cannot decide whether to be a phenologist, conservationist, or philosopher. Leopold uses this work to talk down to his audience of ‘booksmarts’ and point out that traditional education is worsening this country while contradicting many of his arguments along the way. A Sand County Almanac is blindly revered by some scholars who delve too deep into a broken philosophy and scrambled themes of a lived man with eighty acres of land in the sand hills of Wisconsin.  

Contents

• JANUARY: 3
• MARCH: 11
• APRIL: 21
• AUGUST: 38
• JULY: 44
• SEPTEMBER: 56
• NOVEMBER: 70
• DECEMBER: 83
• WISCONSIN: 101
• ARIZONA AND NEW MEXICO: 130
• Chihua HUA AND SONORA: 146
• OREGON AND UTAH: 164
• COUNTRY: 177
• THE ROUND RIVER: 188
• NATURAL HISTORY: 202
• WILDLIFE IN AMERICAN CULTURE: 211
• THE DEER SWATH: 223
• THE LAND ETHIC: 237
• WILDERNESS: 264
• CONSERVATION ESTHETIC: 280

About the author

Aldo Leopold was born in Burlington, Iowa, in 1887. Educated at the Lawrenceville School and Yale University, he joined the United States Forest Service in 1909 as a forest assistant in New Mexico and Arizona. One of the founders of the Wilderness Society, he initiated, in 1924, the first Forest Wilderness Area in the United States (which is now the Gila National Forest). Moving to Madison, Wisconsin, he was Associate Director of the Forest Products Laboratory, as well as consulting forester to several states.

Mr. Leopold founded the profession of game management and wrote the first important book on the subject. In 1933, the University of Wisconsin created a Chair of Game Management for him. He died in 1948, while fighting a brush fire on a neighbor's farm. His death cut short an assignment as an advisor on conservation to the United Nations, and left his book A Sand County Almanac as the last statement of his uncompromising philosophy.

Bibliographic information

• Title: A Sand County Almanac: With Other Essays on Conservation from Round River; A Sierra Club / Ballantine book; A style of life book; Ballantine Books Nature; Ballantine books; Ecological Main Event Series; Outdoor Essays & Reflections
• Author: Aldo Leopold
• Illustrated by: Charles Walsh Schwartz
• Edition: illustrated, reprint, reissue
• Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1970
• ISBN: 0345345053, 9780345345059
• Length: 269 pages
• Subjects: Nature / Ecosystems & Habitats / Mountains; Nature / Environmental Conservation & Protection; Nature / Essays; Nature / Natural Resources