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Reading group: Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, from the shack to the land ethic

Anand Pillai Fellow
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Animals & environmentAmericanChineseDaoismAldo LeopoldArne Naess#ecology#land-ethic#sand-county-almanac#wilderness
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Leopold's A Sand County Almanac was published in 1949, the year after he died helping fight a neighbour's grass fire. It's short, it's beautiful, and its last essay, "The Land Ethic", is one of the founding texts of environmental ethics. I work on water and wetlands in Hyderabad, and I keep returning to it.

Let's read it in three parts, following the book's own divisions:

  1. The almanac itself. A year at his worn-out farm in Wisconsin, month by month. Read it slowly. The ethics is already here, in what he notices.
  2. Sketches Here and There. Essays from other landscapes, including "Thinking Like a Mountain", about shooting a wolf and what he saw in her eyes.
  3. The Upshot. The argument: "Conservation Esthetic", "Wilderness", and "The Land Ethic", with its famous summary that a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community, and wrong when it tends otherwise.

Three weeks each. As we read, I'd like us to keep asking whether the land ethic is a moral theory, a description of how a good farmer sees, or both. And whether it can travel: to Indian wetlands, African cocoa farms, Australian vineyards. Arne Naess and the deep ecologists later built on Leopold; feel free to bring them in.

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  1. Ignacio Fuenzalida

    Contributor

    Part 2. "Thinking Like a Mountain" undid me again. The young Leopold shoots a wolf, reaches her in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes, and comes to see that the mountain needed its wolves: without them, the deer multiply and strip the slopes. The essay is a confession that he once thought fewer wolves meant more deer meant a hunter's paradise. It's the shape of many mistakes in marine ecology too, where removing a predator lets the grazers strip a kelp forest bare.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Liu Jianguo

    Contributor

    Part 1. I read the almanac slowly, as Anand asked, one month each morning after taiji. There's a passage about sawing through an old oak and reading history in its rings, going back year by year as the saw cuts. It reminded me of Daoist writing about the self-so, things being what they are from themselves. But I'll be careful: Leopold wants a new ethic, with rights and wrongs. Zhuangzi would be suspicious of that.

  3. Bec Doyle

    Contributor

    Part 3, from a winemaker. "Integrity, stability and beauty" is a fine summary, but a vineyard is a deliberate disruption of a biotic community, planted in rows on cleared land. If I take the land ethic literally, my whole trade is suspect. If I take it as Leopold the working farmer meant it, it asks me to farm in ways that keep the soil alive and leave room for what was there. I've chosen the second reading, but I notice it's the convenient one.

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  4. Akosua Mensah

    Contributor

    Part 3. My son sent me the land ethic passage and I read it to the cooperative. The older farmers agreed with all of it and then asked who would pay for the shade trees while the cocoa price is what it is. Leopold says an ethic can't rest only on economic self-interest. He's right. But a farmer who loses the farm keeps no ethic at all.

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  5. Anand Pillai

    Fellow

    Thank you, all. Akosua's point is the one Leopold knew best and wrote least about: the land ethic needs economic conditions in which people can afford to keep it. Bec's honesty about "the convenient reading" is also something I'll carry. Next time, perhaps Naess, to see whether deep ecology answers Akosua better.

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