A Sand County Almanac sounds like—and reads like—travel literature to some extent. The reader learns about places and geography and topography and things in those places. It is—no getting around it—travel literature to a point. To an even greater extent it is an example of naturalist writing, of which the most famous is almost certainly Charles Dickens’ account of his revolutionary voyage on the Beagle which led to his theory of evolution. Naturalist fiction takes the reader to places, but it is not really the travel part that is of greatest import. But even that limited generic categorization does not adequately describe A Sand County Almanac.
This is a book about political revolution. If it sits on your shelf at home between Darwin and Dillard (non-alphabetically arranged, of course) then it is time to retrieve it and move it down or up a shelf so that it sits between John Reed and Abbie Hoffman. It is radical political propaganda, but do not confuse propaganda with being negative. What is so radical about the book? The answer to that question can be boiled down to a single quote serving as a sectional subtitle: “Thinking Like a Mountain.”
Thinking like a mountain was coined by the author in his book in the middle of the 20th century and though it seems to have a rather straightforward “duh, of course!” element about it today, it was truly radical then. Thinking like a mountain mean viewing ecological activism from the perspective of being an actively involved part of the surrounding biosphere rather an objective outsider. A Sand County Almanac was not the only such writing, of course, but it is a key text in the evolution of changing how people viewed ecological activism and change and protection of the planet from a location of exceptional superiority of humans to that of being no more nor less significant than anything else which passes through the shadow cast by a mountain.
As stated, this idea seems hardly worthy of even a barely uttered “meh” in today’s hyperactive ecologically aware society. But the true depth of its political radicalism and revolutionary important cannot be understated. Why? Because this change does not merely reflect an intellectual awareness that man may be at the top of the food chain, but prey he doesn’t even eat way down below could hold the key to his extinction. That was bound to be realized eventually and, perhaps, had been discovered much earlier and then abandoned. Why abandon that groundbreaking change in ideology? Because it also requires a leap in morality. It isn’t enough for the author merely to have arrived at the epiphany of how thinking like a mountain changes everything. It also required the ethical leap beyond concerns of profit and preservation of the status quo. A Sand County Almanac is not just a book about political activism, but ethical humanism that is wonderfully disguised as an exceptionally readable example of travel lit.
