Aldo Leopold was an American author, ecologist, scientist and philosopher - areas of expertise that at first glance seem oppositional, to say the least. His main passion was environmentalism; A Sand County Almanac is his best-known work and has sold more than two million copies since its publication in 1949. He is widely considered to be the father of American environmentalism because he emphasized the importance of bio-diversity and he also introduced the science of wildlife management which attempts to balance the needs of man and nature, enabling both to live in close proximity, in a symbiotic relationship.
The is actually no such place as "Sand County, Wisconsin"; a sand county is one of the sections of Wisconsin that has sandy soils underneath it. A Sand County Almanac describes the lands around Sauk County, Wisconsin, where the author lived. The book promotes "Land Ethics", a philosophical framework that tells humans how they should ethically view the land around them. In his writings, it is apparent that Leopold wanted to encourage a responsible relationship between people and the land.
The Almanac is a collection of individual essays by Leopold that his son curated and published shortly after his death. Some of these essays had originally been published in hunting and game-keeping journals and magazines. Some were entirely philosophical discourses that were previously unpublished about the importance of preserving the land as Mother Nature intended.
The book is divided into segments, and the first of these has twelve sub-sections that cover the ecology of the land month by month. The second segment of the book deals more with ecological philosophy and talks about a far more diverse number of lands including Canada and Mexico. The segment is more auto-biographical than philosophical but as Leopold tells stories of childhood spent studying nature, fishing and hunting it is possible to see the transition within him from "doing" to "philosophizing". Leopold's philosophical writings round out the book, bemoaning the fact that there would be no endangered species at all if not for man systematically destroying them.
A Sand County Almanac is the most renowned and referred to book about ecology in the history of the discipline, which is ironic because when it was first published in 1949 it garnered very little attention from a public too busy rebuilding their lives after the end of World War Two, and worrying about the onset of the Cold War to think much about the effects they were having on the environment. However, in the nineteen seventies, when there was a spark in interest in environmentalism and respecting the earth, the paperback edition was the sleeper success of the decade, selling forty thousand copies in just one year. Despite the fact that his writings are almost a century old, Leopold's is voice is still one of the most resonant in the field of ecology today.
