A combination of natural history and philosophy, A Sand County Almanac is a collection of essays by Aldo Leopold that were previously individually published in a variety of hunting, fishing, and philosophical magazines. The term "Sand County" is not from a village or city, instead referring the geology of a particular state or region. The first section of the publication is divided into twelve parts, with each part representing a month. The sections describe their corresponding months, and the subsequent ecological changes that come with them, such as a description of the flora seen throughout the seasons.
The second section of the book is entitled, "Sketches Here and There", and starts focusing more on geologically boundaries, or, places, instead of the times that things are happening in the environment. Many of the essays in this section describe the boyhood experiences of Leopold with nature, such as when he went hunting with a group of other people, killing wolves (at this time, it was believed that the elimination of predators would make animals that people frequently hunt more readily available in the environment. Leopold later describes that this is false, and the removal of a certain species from an ecosystem can result in cataclysmic damage.
Titled, "The Upshot", the third and last section of the book deals with the philosophy of man and nature. One of these ponderings includes how people need physical trophies to prove they are good hunters, and another is on good methods of conservation in an ecosystem, even if not traditional. The book wraps itself up with the important theme that, once there are no wild places left on Earth, humans will lost the opportunity to ever be truly free.
