A Sand County Almanac

Leopold opens Part 3 with a description of the difference between “land” and “country,” with the former describing cultivated land suitable for human purposes, and the latter referring to land that supports a wide array of species, where a drab exterior can belie a rich diversity of life.

Leopold describes one way to interact with country: through the cultivation of a hobby, which he describes as something that “must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant” (182). As an example, he cites an old German merchant who had a cottage in the town where Leopold grew up and used to collect fossil samples of ancient creatures called crinoids from ledges along the Mississippi River. After his death, the town realized that the old man’s eccentric hobby had in fact made him a world expert on crinoids. As another example, Leopold points to falconry; years of patient effort are needed to train a falcon to kill a heron, which is inedible, and this process can easily go wrong, yielding a useless hunter or an escaped bird, making it “the perfect hobby” (184). That humans have the capacity for useless pursuits, which sometimes run against the grain of conventional society, is the highest accomplishment possible for a social animal, Leopold concludes.