Commentary on The Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

The Sand County Almanac

Aldo Leopold was born in 1887 and was raised in Burlington, Iowa. He did a lot of work for conserving nature, and even published his own textbook in 1933. Leopold, who usually wrote journals or for magazines, decided to write a book which compared humanity’s relationship to the rest of the world. Sadly, just one week after receiving a notice that his work would be publish, he died. About a year later, his book was published by his son who decided that the work deserved to be seen. This information was found at http://www.aldoleopold.org/AldoLeopold/leopold_bio.shtml .

You could say that the overall theme of the Sand County Almanac is community versus commodity, do we love nature, or do we use it for our own needs? Aldo Leopold suggests that the modern technology may be well, but should not be taking over nature like it is. He believes that the economic needs do not match up with nature as well as it should, and that humans are slowly making their way to an anti-nature lifestyle. Aldo Leopold pushes us to see nature as “The community in which we belong”. We need to be able to see nature as something other than simply property.

Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring were counted as one of the most environmental books in the 1900’s. The book is considered to be the main reason for the large underpinnings of environmentalism in America. Sand County made many people realize what we were starting to miss, and how nature needs to be taken seriously as a major part of the human life, future, and history. When the book became a best seller in the 1970’s, more and more people start campaigning for better help and overall conservation with nature. More and more people in the community starte...

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...t a book could make you think, not only about life, but the way you are living it. You never think that something so small as a book can change your life until you read it, the same way that you would never think nature so important until you stopped, looked and think about it. I am not the only person affected by this book. You could go ask the other millions of people that read this and immediately started doing what they could for their community. There were so many paragraphs and chapters in this book that I could only describe as beautiful, as if I were there in the field of flowers, or with the green eyes of the wolf. Why is it not possible for me to see those things? Who knows if there are even fields of unique flowers left. We take so much for granted that it makes me angry. I only wish that other people can stop and read and think with this book like I did.