A Neglected Work of History: A Sand County Almanac Turns 75
I first picked up Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac nearly twenty five years ago during my two year wandering interlude between graduate school and the beginning of my career as a high school history teacher. I read and reread it in storm lashed tents on mountain sides and in the back of rattly buses as I crisscrossed America by Greyhound. Its lyrical prose was a welcome change from the often arid and stilted style of professional historians and its bracing critique of the ecological costs of consumerism overturned the view of the world that I had formed growing up amid the material affluence of suburbia.
Over the last year I have frequently found myself taking my well worn copy of A Sand County Almanac off my bookshelf, flipping through its yellowing, dog eared pages, and reflecting on the centrality of it to both modern environmentalism and to my own life and work. It is unsurprising perhaps that the book has been on my mind given that it is the 75th anniversary of its publication and that in just a few short months the young man who was so shaped by Leopold’s words will be fifty. Milestone birthdays, it would seem, have a knack for inducing appreciation and self-reflection.
The canonical status of A Sand County Almanac within environmental circles rests securely on two pillars of insight, the first related to the inseparability of land management from wildlife management. In one of the book’s most touching chapters, Leopold experiences a scientific epiphany after killing a wolf and observing “the fierce green fire dying in her eyes.” In the rimrock country of the desert southwest, he realizes that only by altering his perspective and “thinking like a mountain” can he perceive the connection between the wanton killing of predators, the explosion of deer populations, and the devastating erosion of mountain slopes.
Leopold’s holistic philosophy reaches its crescendo in the book’s rightly celebrated conclusion where he points out the inadequacy of ethical systems that do not encompass “man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it.” Given humanity’s embeddedness within the larger ecosystems that sustain us, Leopold proposes a new “land ethic” that would impose limits on human behavior that do not serve the greater good of the entire biotic community. His bold declaration that there is an ecological component to morality is a revolutionary move in the history of ideas and one that continues to inform and inspire environmental movements around the world.
While A Sand County Alamanc’s contributions to environmental philosophy are widely recognized, it also anticipated several noteworthy developments within the discipline of history that merit similar acclaim. Customarily, practitioners of history were expected to derive their interpretations from source material that was narrowly conceived as written documentation from a particular time period. This imperative sent historians scurrying to the archives to consult all manner of texts, ranging from hieroglyphics carved into stone to the vellum manuscripts of the medieval period.
Long before it became methodically fashionable, Leopold suggested that “real history” ought to turn the page on this over reliance on the written word and come to see that landscapes too are infused with stories. Lamenting the impact of Wisconsin’s roadside mowing crews on his beloved Silphium plants, Leopold compares their destruction to the burning of books for both acts entail the destruction of knowledge about the past. He worries that our understanding of the vast native prairies that once covered much of North America will be diminished should the Silphium be eradicated. This fear reveals Leopold to be in the avant garde of a new intellectual movement, one that recognizes that a richer history will require that we till the land for meaning and see that its harvests are as bountiful as those of the traditional archive.
Closely related to this reimagining of source material is Leopold’s insistence that historians have not been ambitious enough when it comes to the scale of the stories they tell. It has long been a convention in classrooms to assert that history, properly understood, begins with the emergence of writing approximately 5,500 years ago. Everything else that occurred before the scratching of wedge shaped characters on clay tablets in Mesopotamia is typically described dismissively as Prehistory. But in recent years, Deep History has become a popular approach to understanding the human past, positing that there is much to learn about ourselves by plumbing the depths of the remote period in which Homo Sapiens first emerged and subsisted by hunting and gathering. Decades before this interpretative shift occurred, Leopold gestures prophetically in its direction in several poetic passages of A Sand County Almanac. Invoking Darwin, he intimates that a fuller history of humans would probe our distant past and recognize that we are “fellow-voyagers” with other species across evolutionary time and that “the sweep of millennia” has conditioned and shaped our own behavior as much as it has theirs.
It has become common of late to say that we now live in the Age of the Anthropocene, a new epoch whose defining feature is the vast reach and enormous impact of humans on the planet itself. While population growth, the spread of extractive technology, and the rise of a global consumer culture have all played their part in the dawn of the Anthropocene, perhaps our arrival in this new era was ultimately facilitated by the types of stories that have dominated our telling of history. Our cultural trove of stories is overflowing with anthropocentric narratives that celebrate human achievement and assume that our own willful choices have propelled our progress across the centuries. It is not surprising then that those who have heard and reheard these triumphalist tales have gone forth confidently and transformed the planet for the seeming benefit of man.
Leopold offers his readers an altogether different kind of history, one that reads as a sustained warning to humanity rather than an encomium. In an elegiac tone, he reveals in snippets the ecological costs incurred by the affairs of man. He writes that as the boys in blue and gray slaughtered one another during the American Civil War another less remembered bloodbath was occuring. The last native elk in Wisconsin fell to a hunter in 1866 and the woods ceased to echo with the haunting sound of their bugles. And while most historians remember 1914 as the year in which the First World War tore Europe asunder, Leopold mourns the extinction of the passenger pigeon which occurred that same year. He reminds us that it was “the strivings” by which our ancestors “bettered their lot” that robbed us of one of the great delights of spring.
But Leopold’s history is not simply a recitation of the many wounds of the world we have inherited. It also offers a new teleology that seeks to temper humanity’s arrogance by showing us that it is not by our agency alone that our history has been made. As A Sand County Almanac draws to its conclusion, Leopold casts doubt on the heroic narrative of rugged individualism that often frames our histories of American westward expansion. Instead, he suggests that our successes and our failures as we moved across the Appalachians and toward the shores of the Pacific were as dependent on the “characteristics of the land” as “the characteristics of the men who lived upon it.” Many years before contemporary historians began to debate whether nature itself has agency, Leopold showed himself once more to be far ahead of his time. His attentiveness to the ways in which the interactions between humans and natural systems shaped our history was perhaps his most radical, insightful, and enduring contribution to historical theory.
