A Sand County Almanac

Leopold begins A Sand County Almanac with a dedication to people who value wild things, which, he writes “were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them” (xvii). The book is an attempt to remedy that trend by shifting people’s views towards a sense of respect and love for nature.

Part 1 opens with a description of midwinter blizzards on Leopold’s Wisconsin farm, after which creatures like the skunk move from their dens and head out across the snow, “straight cross-country, as if its maker had hitched his wagon to a star and dropped the reins” (3). In January, Leopold writes, there are few distractions, and it is possible to observe phenomena ranging from the journeys of skunks to the burrowing of mice under the snow.

As the year moves into February, Leopold describes another kind of observation: that of the relationship between living things and his ability to feed and warm himself. The tree he uses as fuel for his fire were 80 years old, dating back to the 1860s, and one of the only individuals out of thousands of seedlings to survive the journey from acorn to adulthood, until it was felled by a lightning bolt. As Leopold cuts the fallen tree for wood, he contemplates its lifespan, which goes back in time from the period of Leopold’s ownership of the farm to the tenure of the previous owner, who abused and disrespected the land, and then to the years when, in other parts of the country, national forest was created, marshes were drained, and species from cougar and lynx to the passenger pigeon disappeared from the landscape.