A Sand County Almanac

A Sand County Almanac was published in 1949 amid a rising tide of prosperity and innovation in the United States but also an increase in damaging environmental practices. The book represents a distillation of these tensions insofar as it contrasts a higher standard of living with increasing alienation from the land. The book was also published in the decades after the Great Depression, which had implications for Leopold’s interpretation of economic value and description of human management of the land.

Over the course of the 20th century, human ingenuity ushered in a new wave of technological achievements, many of which represented a break from the natural world. In Part 2, Leopold mentions one of these—“Mr. Du Pont’s nylons”—which were nylon stockings created by the chemical company DuPont (117). These synthetic woman’s stockings were first introduced to the public in 1938 and released to mass market two years later, in 1940. Unlike silk stockings, which required natural fibers (and silkworms), nylon stockings were created entirely in a lab, ushering in a new age of synthetic textiles and thus increasing the divide between humans and the land.

In the same passage as his mention of nylon, Leopold cites Vannevar Bush’s bombs as one of the technological advances of the 20th century.