A Sand County Almanac

Leopold begins this section with a scene of a farmer and his son cutting down an ancient cottonwood to replace it with a Chinese elm, which researchers have determined does not produce cotton every year that clogs the screens of a home. Journeying through Illinois on a bus, Leopold makes further observations about changes made in the name of progress: a widening of the road, a creek alternately straightened and curled by engineers to change the pattern of run-off. To the other passengers on the bus, Leopold notes, these changes—and the ancient cycles that predate them—pass unnoticed, as these passengers are occupied by human concerns.

From here, Leopold goes on to discuss another area changed by the development of roads: the White Mountain of Arizona, which was formerly accessible only on horseback, and even then only in the summer months. Leopold describes a “tacit competition” between riders to be first to ascend the mountain in the summer (131). Once there, riders would find meadows filled with wildflowers and populated by squirrels, where sudden thunderstorms could send shards of rock and wood flying following lightning strikes, which was an experience both frightening and exhilarating; Leopold writes, “It must be a poor life that achieves freedom from fear” (134). After describing some of the locations on the mountain—from The Boneyard, site of a failed cattle ranch, to Paradise Ranch, a lush meadow—Leopold concludes the passage by noting that he hasn’t been back to the Mountain since his youth out of fear for how forestry and tourism have changed the wild character of the place. Another feature of the Mountain—and beyond—that has changed in Leopold’s lifetime is the presence of wolves. As a younger man, Leopold once shot a wolf on the Mountain under the conviction that killing wolves would mean more deer for hunters. As the wolves disappeared, however, the increasing deer population stripped the mountain bare of vegetation. This phenomenon, Leopold writes, is proof that wildness is key to maintaining balance in the world.

Leopold describes an adventure in the Sierra Madre, where he and his brother went for weeks without seeing any trace of other people, their days spent spotting egrets, cormorant, and bobcat and sensing—without seeing—the presence of jaguar. They also feasted off the land, on quail, goose, and deer that had grown fat off a diversity of plants in the Colorado Delta and generally felt themselves to be back in an ancient epoch; the opportunity for that feeling, Leopold concludes, has been lost over the years with the loss of wilderness.

In the next section, Leopold describes a landscape, the Rio Gavilan, that appears stony and inhospitable to a Western eye but actually contains a richness, such as the grasses and roots that feed the buck, under the shelter of an oak tree, which in turn feeds the cougar—just one of the cycles that starts with an oak. This interconnectedness is missed by science, Leopold writes, because science breaks up this system into its component parts, “while the detection of harmony is the domain of poets” (162).

In “Oregon” and “Utah,” Leopold describes the arrival of invasive species and diseases, including Dutch elm disease, chestnut blight, and cheat grass. This latter species has displaced native grasses by thriving in the overgrazed landscapes where native grasses could not thrive. However, cheat grass is itself inedible for livestock and makes the landscape more vulnerable to wildfires, which in turn remove the plants that provide winter food for wildlife from the landscape. Ultimately, cheat grass serves some purposes, too, as the young plants can be used as forage for livestock, but Leopold closes the section by cautioning against the acceptance of cheat grass, as the normalization of an invaded landscape undermines the valuation of native plants and animals.

In Manitoba, Leopold reflects on the ways in which formal education makes people blind to what the natural world has to teach, citing the Clandeboye marsh as an example. The birds that make their home in the marsh know that it is an ancient place, Leopold writes, but this special character is lost on the casual observer. Nonetheless, birds like the Western grebe, who are ignorant of recorded history, have a sense of history that dates back long before the arrival of humans. This heritage does not protect them, however; in closing the section, Leopold notes that this marsh—which he had observed from the standpoint of a muskrat house, to better note the comings and goings of birds and mammals—is disappearing as humans developed more of the landscape: “Someday my marsh, dyked and pumped, will lie forgotten under the wheat, just as today and yesterday will lie forgotten under the years” (172-73).