Biography Of Leopold 's ' A Sand County Almanac ' Essay

Although Leopold’s love of great expanses of wilderness is readily apparent, his book does not cry out in defense of particular tracts of land about to go under the axe or plow, but rather deals with the minutiae, the details, of often unnoticed plants and animals, all the little things that, in our ignorance, we have left out of our managed acreages but which must be present to add up to balanced ecosystems and a sense of quality and wholeness in the landscape.

As a child, I unraveled nature’s beauty and existence. Each new experience brought me feelings of excitement and joy, sparkling my imagination and igniting my curiosity. It all seemed so large back then. Oceans appeared endless as they reached towards the horizon. Treetops seemed to make friends with the puffy-looking clouds as they soared to the sky. Over the years however, as I have grown older and life has become more complex, I am beginning to think less and less about the natural world around me. I glimpse sunset stuck in rush-hour traffic trying to return school after debate practices and only listen to the pitter-patter of the rain when there’s a storm outside. Forests and oceans seemed less appealing as they became intertwined with the urban development. In a way, I was becoming more and more distanced from the so-called nature. So, with an overwhelming desire for adventure and to escape the masses, my family and I drove to Big Bend National Park in Southwest Texas last summer.

In Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, Abbey readily argues for the beauty of the desert and for its complexity, yet simple life. Abbey clearly states that his purpose for writing this book is not for the mere purpose of making a guide book to the beautiful Arches National Park in Utah, but rather a eulogy to the dying wilderness of the desert, due to the spread of the commercialism. Similar to Henry David Thoreau, a renowned environmental essayist in the 1840s, Abbey believes in removing oneself from the life the metropolis lifestyle and secluding oneself in the wilderness of nature and relishing its simplicity of life.

If everyone thought this way our wildlife, animals, nature, and environment would be in better the way you would want them to be treated. This saying is simply stating to people love to have nice things and when we get them we like to keep it that way. So in relation to Leopold we have a nice beautiful environment in which we should keep it that way. Think of our environment as a condition than what it is now. Aldo Leopold was right when he said “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and the beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”(Sand CountyAlmanac, pg. 224-225). It is important for people to reach and follow the values of Leopold explaining that beauty is not just scenery, stability does not mean unchanging for change is essential to nature and the natural world and integrity is wholeness, having all the parts. These three simple values will change our perspective of the

The relationship between people and their environment in A Land Remembered is one where the profit from land exploitation is naturally corrupting and exponentially increases the exploiters lust for larger profit, leading to the exploiter planning larger scale endeavors in the future. The author, Patrick D. Smith (1984), suggests the idea that communities naturally grow in a hedonic cycle to crave more resources to fuel loftier endeavors that require even more resources from the environment, an idea that is also discussed by Aldo Leopold in the Land Ethic as wholly negative, and that is also part of my world view that is rather more optimistic.

* The year 1865 is the birth year of all things natural, wild, and free. Leopold gives it this name because in that year, John Muir offered to buy from his brother, who then owned a farm 30 miles East of Leopold’s oak, a sanctuary for wildflowers that had gladdened his youth. His brother declined but could not suppress the idea. (February, pg. 17)

Aldo Leopold laid the foundation for environmental awareness decades ahead of a “ecological conscience” (257). There have many pleas to reconnect humanity with nature since the release of Leopold’s cherished book. Intuition and reason tell us that living in harmony with our world is more than idealistic—the future of our planet depends on it. The desire for harmony is not new one. Humans have long time sought to live in peace. It is genuine feelings of love and

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise,” said by none other, Aldo Leopold. In A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, an American environmentalist, brought a new idea to the environmentalist’s table: “land ethic.” His idea of a land ethic is a moral responsibility of humans to the natural Earth. Leopold’s idea has been discussed since the publication by a wide variety of people, from the public to scholars. Since

In his book, Last Child in the Woods (2008), Richard Louv illustrates his distaste for the widening divide between man and nature by his use of exemplification, narration and hypophora. Louv’s purpose for writing this book is to inform the audience that mankind should change its ways and move towards a lifestyle that is more appreciative of its surroundings. Louv uses a frustrated tone to invoke the feeling of guilt within the reader because they are responsible for making humanity unappreciative of nature.

Within Aldo Leopold’s Thinking Like a Mountain and Annie Dillard’s Living Like a Weasel there is a communal theme, which incorporates the conflict between people and nature. Throughout Dillard’s piece, she uses comparisons between the life of humans and the life of a wild weasel while applying the theme of freedom of choice. After an unexpected encounter with a weasel, Dillard concludes that humans can learn from the wild freedom of weasel. She states, “...I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive” (Dillard 8). In Aldo Leopold’s writing, his overall motive is to communicate to the reader that we humans must not destroy the wilderness, as

Would I recommend A Sand County Almanac to someone I know? Depending upon who it was, I would definitely recommend this book. I think I would suggest this book for someone who enjoys the outdoors. But someone who does not appreciate the outdoors, in my opinion, would not get as much out of the book. The reason I would recommend this book is because I thought it did a splendid job describing the tinniest things and making them interesting. Who would have known that reading about chickadees feeding or describing a bur oak would be interesting to read? The first part of the book is broken down into months, while the final part really goes into Leopold’s land ethics.

Nature and wilderness were very important ideas to some extant for St. John de Crevecoeur and Ralph Waldo Emerson, each had their own opinions and ideas that contrasted against each other and were somewhat similar to each other. Emerson who valued it and looked at the nature as something to proud of had used it many times in his works as examples and that we are part of nature as well and make whatever choices from it as it can from us. While Crevecoeur believes that in every land it has its own form of culture as it does its own kind of nature, and describes how the land and nature was then and how it will be giving details of it in his pieces of work. How they use and see nature is described equally important in both their works “the American Scholar” and “What is an American” but shows how different their views really are in them.

During his time, Aldo Leopold was a conservationist who believed in the longevity of the land and that we should protect it, even if we must protect the land from ourselves. While this was an unpopular opinion, realizing that the land and animals naturally work together in a symbiotic relationship to protect one another was very apparent to Leopold. He believed that humans should be doing our best to lessen our impact on the environment. Time has caught up with Leopold’s ideologies and it is time that our efforts and contributions to the earth did too.

The first thing that Callicott discussed in reference to the neglect of Leopold’s writings was the fact that they could actually be done in a phrase or even one or two sentences. Leopold generalizes Darwin’s writings and the extended paradigm. Leopold states that “all ethic’s so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts” (Leopold, 2013). Callicott explains that this basic phrase comes up again in “The Land Ethic” multiple times. This theory provides a link of the community concept that all plants, animals, and birds are interconnected with earth other. (Callicott, 2012)

Another adjustment to the microscope, and we can examine Leopold's biocentric opinion of how environmental ethics should be governed. His approach enlarges the moral category to include soils, waters, plants and animals and claims our obligation is to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. Philosophers Devall and Sessions further define the biocentric view with the concept of deep ecology. Devall and Sessions argue that "the well-being and flourishing of human and non-human life have value in themselves. These values are independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes." (503)