At 71, 'A Sand County Almanac' remains fresh and engaging

A new edition of "A Sand County Almanac" recently hit bookstore shelves, just 71 years after it was originally published. Though it was slow to find an audience, Aldo Leopold's reflections on his central Wisconsin landscape would become widely embraced by the environmental movement in the 1970s and hailed as a classic piece of conservation literature.

The 2020 edition comes with a new forward written by novelist Barbara Kingsolver. In it she writes there are few books to which she returns time and again. But "A Sand County Almanac" is a gift which keeps on giving.

Kingsolver explains how each time she picks up her copy, each time slightly with new understandings of the world, she finds new truths in its pages. 

"So it has come to pass, that Aldo Leopold, a man who died before I was born, is part of my inner circle.  I always look forward to cracking open his door, ‘A Sand County Almanac,’ for another chat," she writes.

The book begins as an almanac, recounting the passage of the seasons.  Leopold was a Wisconsin academic who spent years in the 1930s and 40s restoring a sandy-soiled farm near Baraboo. That soil inspired the title and the farm inspired its contents.

Leopold writes about the animals and birds he sees on the property: describing the ducks and geese as they migrate north and then south.  He follows how their behaviors — and his — change as winter moves to spring, then summer to fall and back to winter. 

"It encourages and invites us to come back year after year" said Buddy Huffaker, executive director of the Aldo Leopold Foundation. He says the writing is so evocative it is a staple of literature classes, and it's even in a standard Chinese textbook for middle-schoolers.

"[They’re u]sing 'The geese return' out of 'A Sand County Almanac' not as a piece of environmental writing but as a piece of fine American literature," said Huffaker.

 Leopold’s book also recounts lessons learned from rural life.

"There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm,” he writes. “One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery. And the other, that heat comes from the furnace. To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue."

To avoid the second, Leopold recommends the hard work and subsequent satisfaction splitting a cord of oak. But then Huffaker says Leopold expands his exploration into what he called the land ethic.

"He is challenging us to consider ourselves part of the biological community not apart from the biological community," he said.

For his time, the 1930s and 40s, it was a revolutionary way of thinking. It took Leopold 13 years to write "A Sand County Almanac" and then he struggled to find a publisher.

Huffaker said it was "rejected time and time again before finally Oxford University Press agreed to publish it a week before his death."

Leopold and his family had gone to the farm to celebrate the publishing deal. While there Leopold ran to fight a brushfire on his neighbors property and collapsed and died. 

Published a year later in 1949, the book was far from a best seller. However in 1970, with the advent of Earth Day, Huffaker says sales of a new paperback edition exploded.

"With Earth Day there was a whole country looking for good environmental literature and Leopold got rediscovered" said Huffaker.

He hopes this new edition of ‘A Sand County Almanac’ with the Kingsolver introduction will attract a new generation to the book. He says Leopold's ideas of taking care of the planet, and of each other speak to 2020. 

"Currently with climate change, COVID-19, Black Lives Matter,  social justice emerging as a crystalizing, catalyzing, call for action, I have been pleased to go back to Leopold and find that he welcomes us in that space and is challenging us to  think about how we move forward," he said.

And Huffaker also hopes the new edition will encourage those who read the book years ago to return to crack Aldo Leopold's door for another chat.

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