A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

A SAND COUNTY ALMANAC: And Sketches Here and There by Aldo Leopold Spend some time with Aido Leopold in Sand County to learn how the natural environment and it’s wildlife inhabitance live in harmony through the months and seasons of the year. I enjoyed this book so much that I’ve shared it with others who also purchased their own copies.

This should be on the reading list for every high-school.

Well, l love non-fiction and nature so l finally read this all-time classic. How many different ways can one describe the day's clouds? I also recently read The Grapes of Wrath. Conclusion: "Great" authors, for example, can fill a page telling us about a turtle crossing the road. Not my "cup of tea."

Leopold has completely changed the way I see the natural world. His close encounters of various animals show his immense knowledge regarding them. This is was man that has seen animals leave this world for good, and he tries to let us know how we need to change before they are all gone.

Long considered the first book on conservation, this should be read by everyone. The author's love of land, wildlife and nature are fully expressed. Those thoughts are followed by philosophizing on conservation - ethics, practice, economics, etc. Written in the nascent stages of conservation in this country, a time when it was more thought than practice, the issues still resonate today. One sees the difficulties both in expanding environmental conservation as well as the pitfalls and errors made in the area (with all good intent) since the forties when Leopald wrote.Interestingly, especially to me as someone who hunts, much is written in the context of hunting. He also has some insightful words about why people do hunt as a connection to nature. As only a hunter can, he identifies the hunter's reverance for the land and nature.Portions of this were assigned when I was in college. Now, 28 years later, the entirety means much more. It should be required reading for everyone, especially lovers of the outdoors.

The "Almanac" has been published several ways during the past fifty years, I strongly recommend the book published by Oxford University Press. It includes Thinking like a Mountain, The Land Ethic, and other important essays.From Leopold's Sketches: "Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language."Scientist, educator, forester, philosopher, writer -- Aldo Leopold appears to many as something of an enigma. In his earlier writings, Leopold was a very different man than we find in this volume. In Leopold's own words: "I was young then, and full or trigger-itch." This insightful classic is a gentle, scholarly, fatherly collection of essays, observations and stories. Like Thoreau's Walden, it is revered, loved and widely imitated. Leopold: "Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf. ... The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf's job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have ... rivers washing the future into the sea."