This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.
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 America's relationship to the land. As the forerunner to such important books as Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Edward Abbey's Desert solitaire, and Robert Finch's The primal place, this classic work remains as relevant today as it was nearly sixty years ago.… (more)
coclimber: Although Abbey writes with an undertone of harshness at times, his love of the desert environment and ability to bring you into that world are a delight to anyone who loves our natural world.
Mark Twain said, “A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” If you spend any time at all reading ecological literature, you will see A Sand County Alamanc referred to as one of the classics in the genre. But in this case, Twain is wrong. This is a wonderful book. Leopold has a wry style; never out-and-out funny, but enough to keep my smiling throughout much of the book. He also deploys references historical, philosophical, religious, and literary, giving the text a rich texture. But Leopold also has a deadly serious point to the book. And he makes his case well, which is why people have been reading this book for 70 years. I highly, highly recommend the book. ( )
Beautifully written. I can't believe this was written in the 1940s. Essential reading for those interested in conservancy or anything to do with the natural world around us. I will be returning to this book often to reexamine the world around us. ( )
This was immensely boring. The majority of the book is Leopold waxing poetic about various animals and plants. In the final section, he finally speaks about the application of ethics to ecology, which was slightly more thought-provoking, but not necessarily well-written or -organized.
He said just a handful of things that I believe were worth writing about, but I have to believe that someone, somewhere, has done much greater justice to nature writing.
Note: There are references to Darwinian evolutionary theory as fact. ( )
There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. (Forward)
Each year, after the midwinter blizzards, there comes a night of thaw, when the tinkle of dripping water is heard in the land.
Quotations
To me an ancient cottonwood is the greatest of trees because in his youth he shaded the buffalo and wore a halo of pigeons, and I like a young cottonwood because he may some day become ancient.
But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.
To see America as history, to conceive of destiny as a becoming, to smell a hickory tree through the lapse of ages--all these things are possible for us, and to achieve them takes only the free sky, and the will to ply our wings. In these things, and not in Mr. Bush's bombs and Mr. DuPont's nylons, lies objective evidence of our superiority over the beasts.
Despite several opportunities to do so, I have never returned to the White Mountains. I prefer not to see what tourists, roads, sawmills, and logging railroads have done for it, or to it. I hear young people, not yet born when I first rode out 'on top,' exclaim about it as a wonderful place. To this, with an unspoken mental reservation, I agree.
It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of the species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise. Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.
...Thoreau's dictum 'In wildness is the salvation of the world.'
A professor may pluck the strings of his own instrument, but never that of another, and if he listens for music he must never admit it to his fellows or to his students. For all are restrained by an ironbound taboo which decrees that the construction of instruments is the domain of science, while the detection of harmony is the domain of poets. Professors serve science and science serves progress. It serves progress so well that many of the more intricate instruments are stepped upon and broken in the rush to spread progress to all backward lands. One by one the parts are thus stricken from the song of songs. If the professor is able to classify each instrument before it is broken, he is well content.
Science contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world. Its great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view. This means doubting everything except facts; it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may. One of the facts hewn to by science is that every river needs more people, and all people need more inventions, and hence more science; the good life depends on the indefinite extension of this chain of logic. That the good life on any river may likewise depend on the perception of its music, and the preservation of some music to perceive, is a form of doubt not yet entertained by science.
This thumbnail sketch of land as an energy circuit conveys three basic ideas: that land is not merely soil, that the native plants and animals kept the energy circuit open; others may or may not, that man-made changes are of a different order than evolutionary changes and have effects more comprehensive than is intended or foreseen
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. Signatures of course differ, whether written with axe or pen, and this is as it should be.
Last words
Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.
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 America's relationship to the land. As the forerunner to such important books as Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Edward Abbey's Desert solitaire, and Robert Finch's The primal place, this classic work remains as relevant today as it was nearly sixty years ago.
)
)
)
)
Google Books — Loading...
Wikipedia in English (7)
7