A review by laurareads87
A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation from Round River by Aldo Leopold

informative medium-paced

2.0

Sand County Almanac is a classic of conservation writing, released posthumously by the author’s son as two volumes (here combined) in 1949 and 1953. 

What I appreciated about this book is some of the nature writing – there are some truly beautiful turns of phrase here, and I enjoyed the author’s descriptions of the land, trees, and animals. As someone who grew up on a similar latitude to Sand County, many of the species were very familiar to me which I’m sure made me appreciate it even more. I also appreciate Leopold’s vision of education fostering an ethical orientation toward land and other species and a desire to understand the complex interconnections of ecosystems – these visions, I think, are still relevant and still needed amidst so much disconnection from nature. 

With this said, there is a lot about this book that I think doesn’t work today, and which I found rather frustrating. He writes that “we abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us” [xviii] and that conceiving of nature in capitalist terms, or in capitalist terms only anyway, is a problem – yes!! – but then continues to conceptualize it in terms of “resources” for humans to use (albeit not solely economic resources). This, I think, doesn’t go nearly far enough to undermining the commodifying thinking he criticizes. He calls for enlarging the boundaries of ethical community to include non-human species and the land, and to conceptualizing nature in terms of community, yet continues to set humans apart, even writing of humans’ “superiority over the beasts” having “objective evidence” to support it [117-119] and continuing to justify killing members of other species simply for the enjoyment of it. There is also very little connection made between the exploitation of the land for capitalist gain and America as a violent colonial project. So, while I can see relevance of this text in learning about the history of ecological or conservation writing in the United States, I cannot recommend it beyond that. 

Content warning: animal cruelty, violence towards & death of non-human animals, colonialism 
Expand filter menu Content Warnings