A Sand County Almanac at 75: Stories About the Essays

– Leah Bieniak: Hello, everyone, and thank you all so much for being here today.

We’re really excited to have Stan Temple with us to talk about the history of A Sand County Almanac in celebration of its 75th anniversary.

Stan will be talking about the history of the book and some of the lesser-known stories of how these essays came to be.

Dr. Temple has been a part of the Leopold Foundation since its creation in 1982.

He began as a science advisor to our board of directors, and now serves as one of our senior fellows, providing advice to our board and our staff on a range of conservation issues, and also representing the foundation to the public.

Dr. Temple received his PhD in ecology from Cornell, and from 1976 to 2008, he was the Beers-Bascom Professor in Conservation in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This professorship was also held by Aldo Leopold from 1933 to 1948.

And teaching and following in Leopold’s footsteps has allowed Dr. Temple to share the land ethic in over 21 countries and to have a deep knowledge of Leopold’s writing and conservation ideas.

So we are very grateful to have Dr. Temple with us today to celebrate the 75th anniversary of A Sand County Almanac.

[audience applauding] – Thank you, Leah.

For most people, if they’ve heard the name Aldo Leopold, it’s an association with this little book that was published in 1949.

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold’s masterwork, really, has become one of the classic pieces of environmental literature.

It seems to be timeless and timely at the same time as it continues to be a well-read and popular book.

So today, I’m gonna share some of the backstories behind this book and the essays that it contains.

I pondered, how do you start a talk about a famous book?

And I decided to start at the beginning, with Aldo Leopold’s opening words in the front matter.

“There are some who can live without wild things “and some who cannot.

“These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.”

What better way to open the book than with the author’s words?

And continuing, Leopold died before this book was actually in print, and somewhat curiously in the forward matter, he says, “I do not imply that this philosophy of land “was always clear to me.

It is rather the end result of a life journey.”

He obviously didn’t know that he was going to die before the book came out, but the life journey that he describes here is traced in the book, and it’s a fascinating journey that happens during probably the most important phases of the beginning of the conservation movement in North America.

So the legs of Leopold’s life journey start in Iowa as a boy.

He’s an outdoorsy kid interested in hunting and fishing and birdwatching and natural history studies.

He studies forestry and joins the brand-new U.S. Forest Service.

His job there leads him to be interested in wilderness protection, and eventually to really evolve into what his passion was, which was wildlife conservation.

After he quits the Forest Service, he moves back to the Midwest and is now confronted with a very different sort of environment for conservation.

In the Forest Service, he was dealing with publicly-owned wildlands.

Here in the Midwest, he’s dealing with privately-owned working lands.

For Leopold, the challenge of getting conservation done on private lands is what ultimately led him to one of his most important ideas, the end result really of that journey, which was this twin concept of land health and a land ethic.

So for Leopold, the legs of his journey documented in this book trace a journey that pretty much traces the evolution of conservation during the 20th century.

So the origins of the 41 essays that are included in the book all start on yellow legal paper with Leopold’s neat handwriting.

The monthly essays in the first part of the book, the “Almanac” essays, are directly taken from Aldo Leopold’s field notes and journals while he was visiting the Shack, his weekend getaway from Madison.

The middle section of the book, “Sketches Here and There,” come from various parts of his life journey, tracing his evolution as a conservationist.

The final section of the book, “The Upshot,” is where he lays out the end result, the land ethic and the concept of land health.

Among these 41 essays, 17 of them had actually appeared earlier in other publications and were duplicated here in the book, but let’s start with the earliest one that’s included.

It comes from his boyhood in Iowa.

The outdoorsy kid here accompanying his father on a hunting trip.

Leopold was an avid hunter.

And for anyone who is a hunter or fisher, a memorable experience is the first time they’ve had success in the field, as it was for Leopold.

“Red Legs Kicking” describes his boyhood experience as a duck hunter bagging his first duck.

“Finally, at sunset, a lone black duck came out of the west, “and without even a preliminary circling, “set his wings and pitched downward.

“I cannot remember the shot.

“I remember only my unspeakable delight “when my first duck hit the snowy ice with a thud and lay there, belly up, red legs kicking.”

Perhaps not appreciated by anyone who’s not a hunter, but for those who are, you’ll know the sentiment that Leopold is expressing here.

His early career after graduating from Yale University was in the brand-new U.S. Forest Service in Arizona and New Mexico, where a 22-year-old Aldo Leopold was suddenly responsible for the management of literally hundreds of thousands of publicly-owned wildlands.

The essays that come from this 15-year period of his career are among some of the favorites among readers of A Sand County Almanac.

The seven essays that come from the West and from trips across the border into Mexico are quite memorable, but the one that is most memorable is the essay “Thinking Like a Mountain.”

Among readers of A Sand County Almanac, this is probably one of their favorite essays, and it’s an essay that almost never happened.

For Aldo Leopold, the encounter during the first two weeks of his career in the Forest Service involved shooting a wolf.

And in the essay, he said, “We reached the old wolf in time “to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.

“I was young then, and full of trigger itch.

“I thought because fewer wolves meant more deer, “that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise.

“But after seeing the green fire die, “I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”

It’s a very personal essay that almost never happened because the original draft of this essay was impersonal.

Leopold was talking in third person about predator control in the West, and it was only after one of his students reviewed the first draft and pointed out to him that he should come clean that he was not just a distant observer, he was part of this program, completely changed the character of the essay.

It also became controversial because many people have gone through Aldo Leopold’s journals that are housed in the University of Wisconsin archives, and find no mention in any of his journals of shooting a wolf.

And they therefore concluded that this must be a parable of sorts.

It never really happened, but he’s using it as a mechanism for explaining something important.

But then a few years ago, a letter emerged that Aldo Leopold had written to his family during that second week of his Forest Service career.

And in the essay, he says, almost as a matter of fact, “By the way, Wheatley and I have killed two timber wolves.”

And as you read the letter, you’re waiting for the green fire epiphany, and it never comes.

The 22-year-old Aldo Leopold did not see the green fire or did not appreciate it.

That happened later in his career.

But the change in Aldo Leopold’s attitudes toward predators is marked.

If you look at early 1916 comments, “The sportsmen demand the eradication of lions, wolves, “coyotes, and bobcats.

Either wolves or game must go.”

And in A Sand County Almanac, “Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend.

“You cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.

You cannot love game and hate predators.”

180-degree turn.

There were other memorable events during Leopold’s time in the West that are recorded in A Sand County Almanac.

One of them was a visit across the border into Mexico to the Rio Gavilan Watershed.

This was a hunting trip for Aldo Leopold, but it was an eye-opening experience for him.

As he says, “It was here that I first clearly realized “that land is an organism, “that all my life I had seen only sick land, “whereas here was a biota still in perfect aboriginal health.

The term ‘unspoiled wilderness’ took on a new meaning.”

Well, this wasn’t wilderness in that there were no people there.

People had lived there from millennia.

The Indigenous peoples, Spanish colonists had lived there for centuries, but what Leopold saw was a landscape in which the people living there were in harmony with the ecosystem.

It was not sick land; it was not damaged by people’s activities.

Leopold in his writing, in many of his essays, does something that’s been described as poetic science, where he takes an important scientific concept and boils it down into very simple poetic language.

And in talking about the Rio Gavilan watershed, he does this perfectly.

He’s talking about the complexity of ecosystems, but here’s how he describes it in the “Song of the Gavilan.”

“To hear even a few notes of it, “you must know the speech of the hills and rivers.

“A vast, pulsing harmony, “its score inscribed on a thousand hills, “its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.”

Likening the complexity of an ecosystem with all its complex parts to an orchestra and a symphony.

The essays from the Midwest, the final years of Leopold’s career, there are six of them, and again, include some of the favorites.

For Leopold, the Midwest was coming home to some extent, but in a completely different context.

He’s now a mature ecologist conservationist.

He quits the Forest Service in 1928 and takes a contract job that required him to travel extensively around the upper Midwest, trying to figure out why game populations were in such miserable shape, in such bad shape that it was actually affecting the bottom line of people who sold hunting equipment because there just wasn’t any game to hunt.

White-tailed deer were virtually absent on the landscape.

Birds like wild turkey were gone.

Birds like sandhill cranes were very scarce.

So Leopold was sent out to just figure out what’s going on.

He traveled extensively for three years around the upper Midwest.

And when he came home, he wrote a report that somewhat contradicted the terms of his contract, which expected him to come home and conclude that the miserable condition of wildlife in the upper Midwest was a failure of protection.

That there was too much poaching, that there weren’t enough game wardens, that the hunting laws weren’t strict enough.

That sort of frame of reference.

Leopold came back, and in his 1931 book, described something very different, said, the condition of wildlife in the upper Midwest has nothing to do with a failure of legal protection.

It has to do with the habitat.

1931, that was a novel insight.

No one else was really thinking about wildlife and habitat as being that closely related.

So it’s a big deal for Aldo Leopold.

It’s basically him, now for the first time, expressing not only a passion for conservation, but an understanding that there’s much to benefit from a linkage between the science of ecology and the practice of conservation.

There’s one essay from his three-year travels, and it will be instantly relatable to anyone from the upper Midwest.

It’s the “Illinois Bus Ride.”

Leopold is taking a trip across Illinois.

“The highway stretches like a tightrope across the corn, “oats, and clover fields.

“The bus ticks off the opulent miles.

“The passengers talk and talk and talk.

“To them, Illinois is only the sea on which they sail to ports unknown.”

Leopold, of course, goes on in the essay to describe how the absence of wildlife from the landscape in Illinois is perfectly clear why that’s happening.

So Leopold is gathering his reputation as a conservationist.

He has a big year in 1933 after he’s finished with the game survey and has gained some notoriety from that.

But in 1933, he publishes a book that summarizes his findings about linking ecology and conservation, and the book was entitled Game Management.

It’s an extremely important book because up to this point, if you were engaged in wildlife conservation, it was almost certainty that your job was a game warden.

You were there to enforce legal protection of wildlife.

Leopold turns the table and says, “That’s not enough.

We need to manage wildlife.”

And his book, Game Management, introduces to the world a new branch of the profession.

From this point on, people were likely to call their job “wildlife manager.”

1933 was also a big year because his growing notoriety led to an unprecedented faculty position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

It came right on the heels of him publishing this blockbuster, paradigm-shifting book.

And Leopold will spend the final 15 years of his career as a professor at the University of Wisconsin.

The position was the first in the world at any university devoted to this new field of wildlife management that Aldo Leopold had literally just introduced in his book that year.

So the remainder of the essays all come from Leopold’s final 15 years of life in the Midwest.

And again, it includes some favorites among readers.

Probably among the Midwestern essays, “Marshland Elegy” is a favorite.

“Marshland Elegy” was first published in 1937, and Leopold, who had become fascinated with sandhill cranes, wrote this rather poignant essay.

The first half of the essay extols the magnificence of sandhill cranes.

The second half of the essay is the downer, in which he says, “And it looks as though sandhill cranes “are not gonna make it.

They’re gonna disappear from the upper Midwest.”

But it’s a wonderfully, again, poetic essay where he describes sandhill cranes as “the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution.”

1937 was just a little over a decade after the protection for migratory birds with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act had come into place.

And sandhill cranes had not yet begun to show the amazing recovery that they’ve shown since then.

Aldo Leopold wasn’t often wrong, but in this case, he was wrong.

Sandhill cranes, as anyone in the Midwest knows, have come back stronger than ever.

It just took a long time for them to get there.

But “Marshland Elegy” is a favorite for his very poetic writing and the fact that it’s about a bird that many people find fascinating.

Another essay about a bird that wasn’t so fortunate is the passenger pigeon that went extinct early in Aldo Leopold’s boyhood.

The essay “On a Monument to the Pigeon” was an essay that began as a talk to the Wisconsin Society of Ornithology when they erected this monument to the passenger pigeon.

The monument sits at the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers on a tall bluff.

It’s a beautiful setting commemorating, of course, a tragic event, that the most abundant bird in North America was extinct.

Aldo Leopold’s talk evolved into the essay “On a Monument to the Pigeon.”

And as he is often able to do, he really seizes the central importance of this monument.

He says, “We grieve because no living man “will see again the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds, “sweeping a path for spring across the March skies, “chasing the defeated winter from all the woods and prairies of Wisconsin.”

And here’s the gem, “For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.”

Leopold was absolutely correct.

This is the very first time that human beings had ever so publicly acknowledged that they had caused another species to go extinct and had so visibly expressed their loss.

The essays that comprise the almanac, of course, come from the Shack Years, from 1935 to 1948.

In 1935, Aldo Leopold bought a rundown farm on the banks of the Wisconsin River.

On that rundown farm, there was one building left, an outbuilding that the family, upon first visiting it, described as a chicken coop knee-deep in manure.

The family turned it into their beloved weekend retreat, called the Shack.

And the essays from the years 1935 to 1948 are significant.

Leopold is now a mature scientist and conservationist.

He’s at the peak of his knowledge of natural history and ecology.

And the essays reflect the fact that he is not only a very observant naturalist, but that he records so many details of what he is seeing and hearing in his journals.

Prominent among those are his notes on phenology.

Phenology is the study of the timing of seasonal events.

And for Aldo Leopold, keeping records of the changing seasons, when migratory birds come and go, when plants blossom and so on, was something that he had done ever since childhood.

But the Shack journals, from 1935 to 1948, are where Leopold’s record-keeping reaches its highest level.

He’s keeping track of over 300 species of plants and animals, and he’s recording the fine details of their annual cycle.

And they provide the raw material for the essays in the first part of the book, the Almanac section, which is basically a month-by-month recounting of iconic events that Aldo Leopold and his family are observing while they’re at the Shack.

Commenting on his passion for keeping phenological records, Leopold observed that “Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.”

For Aldo Leopold, since childhood, it had always been keeping journals to record the pleasant times that he and his family and students had spent in the field, but Leopold went further than just recording what he was observing.

He went back and looked at his notes and tried to find order and meaning in the things that he was observing.

For Leopold, his journals are remarkable.

And the Aldo Leopold Foundation has just recently finished transcribing his journals.

So they’ll soon be available online for people to read in transcribed form.

But here’s what they look like in the raw form.

This was a journal entry from the first week in May of 1940.

That weekend, there was two inches of snow.

But then you see the phenology list, all of these events that Leopold and the family were observing that they thought might be the first occurrence of that particular event for the year.

Leopold subsequently comes back and looks through his journals, and you’ll notice over some of these observations, there’s a little tick mark.

The little tick mark was Leopold retrospectively identifying that particular observation of an event as the first of the year.

Now, why was he doing that?

Why would he go back and tediously go through all these records and find the first dates of the year?

Well, it was because he was fascinated with patterns and had an uncanny ability to actually detect patterns in the things that he was observing.

The 22 Almanac essays, as I said, arranged month by month, described some iconic event that was happening each month.

These are delightful essays.

There’s no question, when Leopold in his forward talked about delights and dilemmas, these are the delights, Leopold describing these sometimes amazing events in the field.

And his motive, I think, is to help you fall in love with nature, to realize how much enjoyment there is in observing natural events.

But for those who have read the Almanac essays, there’s one essay that reveals that Leopold is going back to his journals and paying attention to all those little tick marks that he made.

It’s “Prairie Birthday.”

“Prairie Birthday” for the month of July, in which Leopold describes, “Every July, I watch eagerly the corner “of a certain country graveyard “that I pass driving to and from my farm.

“This yard-square relic “of original Wisconsin gives birth, each July, “to a man-high stock of compass plant, “or cutleaf silphium, spangled “with saucer-sized yellow blossoms resembling sunflowers.

“This year, I found the silphium in first bloom on 24 July, “a week later than usual.

During the last six years, the average date was 15 July.”

He’s gone back to his journals and calculated the average date on which the compass plant blooms.

So why was he doing this?

It wasn’t just out of idle curiosity.

Instead, he was extracting all these thousands of observations of plants and animals and he’s putting them into what I would like to describe as a 1945 Excel spreadsheet.

It’s handwritten; it’s dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of pages of graph paper in which he’s tediously plotted out all of these observations, looking for that order and meaning, looking for the patterns that are revealed.

And in 1947, he summarizes it all in what is now a classic paper, “A Phenological Record for Sauk and Dane Counties,” published in one of the premier ecological journals of the time.

It was a paper that didn’t get much attention at the time.

Keeping phenological records was kind of old-fashioned.

Modern ecologists weren’t that fond of natural history studies.

They wanted to see results that were the result of the modern scientific method.

But they published Aldo Leopold’s paper, a fairly significant paper in its length, and there’s a backstory there.

They published the paper while Aldo Leopold was the president-elect of the Ecological Society of America.

So I’m guessing that the editor of the journal was not too keen about rejecting a major paper by the incoming president of the society.

But this paper ends up being a classic.

Because Leopold kept track of hundreds of ecological events, it became a marker against which we can compare all of these hundreds of different events during the era of climate change.

Leopold’s marker for the period 1935 to 1945 gives us a benchmark against which we can compare how plants and animals are coping with the climate change that Aldo Leopold couldn’t possibly have anticipated.

Although in his paper, he does note the very tight relationship between temperature and when events occur.

So to some extent, he not only gave us historical records, but he gave us an insight that many of these annual events are closely tied to temperature, hence during the era of climate change are advancing in when they happen during the year.

So this was Leopold’s fascination with seasonal events, but he was also fascinated with cycles of activity among animals, especially during the day.

And one thing that really caught his attention was the dawn chorus of birds.

It turns out Aldo Leopold was an insomniac.

He habitually got up early, and when on weekends at the Shack he got up early and stepped outside, he was exposed to the dawn chorus of birds, which, in typical fashion, he started recording the details of in his journals, meticulous details about the dawn chorus.

And those observations are reflected in two essays in A Sand County Almanac, “Great Possessions” and “The Choral Copse.”

That he devoted two essays to this passion of his is an indication of how significant it was for him.

So in the essay “Great Possessions,” Leopold observed that “My daily ceremony, “contrary to what you might suppose, “begins with the utmost decorum.

“At 3:30 a.m., with such dignity as I can muster, “I step from my cabin door, “bearing in either hand a pot of coffee and notebook.

“I get out my watch, pour coffee, “and lay notebook on knee.

This is the cue for the proclamations to begin.”

The proclamations, of course, are birds joining the dawn chorus in the spring.

For anyone who is not an early riser, it is a beautiful spectacle to hear all of the birds in your immediate surroundings in order, in a very orderly fashion, joining the dawn chorus.

Leopold, of course, was fascinated by the fact that this was orderly and wanted to figure out why did birds join the dawn chorus in such an orderly, predictable succession.

And as he had done with his phenological records over the year, he put all of these records into another one of those 1940s Excel spreadsheets.

Only this time, he was actually doing an experiment.

The experiment was recording when birds joined the dawn chorus on cloudy days versus clear days.

The difference being the light intensity.

The light intensity being lower on cloudy days, Leopold observed that on cloudy days, birds joined the chorus later than on clear days, indicating to him that what was driving this was the intensity of light.

So for Leopold, he never got to publish these results.

He died before he was able to publish them.

But he left us a rich collection of his observations and early drafts of his analysis.

So a number of years ago, the National Science Foundation was opening a new field of study called soundscape ecology, where ecologists look at the sound associated with an ecosystem and try to analyze the complexity of the total sound that’s associated with an ecosystem as a way of monitoring what Leopold would’ve described as land health.

So the opening of this competition was held right here at the Leopold Center, and I was asked to do the opening keynote because the organizers knew of Leopold’s fascination with sound.

Anyone who’s read A Sand County Almanac knows there are just repeated references to the sounds of nature throughout all of the essays.

So I decided to do something clever for the keynote, and that was to go back to Aldo Leopold’s records and see whether I could recreate what Leopold was listening to back in the ’30s and ’40s from his detailed notes.

Here from “The Coral Copse,” he says, “In June, it is completely predictable “that the robin will give voice when the light reaches, “light intensity reaches one-hundreth candle power, “and that the bedlam of other singers will follow in predictable sequence.”

Well, here’s Aldo revealing that he’s tied the sequence to the light intensity.

So for the recreation that I was going to attempt, we picked the 1st of June, 1940 from 4:00 a.m. to 4:30 a.m., and I engaged the help of Chris Bocast, a graduate student who had been an audio engineer for rock bands, who was willing to work with me and mix the sounds to recreate Aldo Leopold’s notes.

So we obtained recordings of the birds from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s collection, and Chris and I used Aldo Leopold’s notes to mix them into a recreation of what Aldo Leopold had heard for all 17 of these species.

I’ll play a few clips here.

[American robin singing] Everyone will recognize the American robin giving first voice as the first bird to join the dawn chorus.

For a while, it’s just the American robin, but of course, eventually, as more and more of these birds joined the dawn chorus, it’s no longer just a single instrument playing; it’s an entire symphony playing.

So we’ll skip ahead here and play the end.

What we’ve got now, over a dozen species, all singing together in the dawn chorus.

[multiple birds singing] If you listen closely, you can probably pick out a few individuals.

But in fact, as the soundscape ecologist would observe, it’s the totality of the sound that now becomes significant, not just the songs of the individual birds.

The mourning dove coming in.

So for Leopold’s dawn chorus notes, the landscape ecologists, or soundscape ecologists were absolutely blown away that someone could have taken such meticulous notes.

That in an era before tape recording was possible, that you could actually recreate the sounds that they were hearing.

Leopold was a lifelong hunter.

And of course, there are essays that include hunting.

One from the Midwest is “Smoky Gold.”

Leopold’s writing here about ruffed grouse hunting.

And he observes that there are two kinds of hunting: ordinary hunting and ruffed grouse hunting.

There are two places to hunt grouse: ordinary places and Adams County.

There are two times to hunt in Adams County: ordinary times and when the tamaracks are smoky gold.

Anyone from the Midwest knows that tamaracks turn this amazing color in the fall during hunting season.

For Leopold, hunting ruffed grouse involved taking out his favorite shotgun, a double-barrelled 20-gauge custom-made A.H. Fox shotgun that probably came close to costing him his marriage.

During his time in the Forest Service, he got a bonus.

Leopold coveted one of these custom-made shotguns.

His wife, Estella, coveted one of these newfangled washing machines to deal with the children at home.

Well, obviously Leopold won there.

But the shotgun became his favorite hunting weapon throughout the rest of his life.

We don’t have many photographs of Aldo Leopold smiling.

Kind of surprising; you know, most of the photographs, he has a kind of a stern look on his face, but there’s one notable photograph in which he is smiling broadly, and it’s this one.

After a ruffed grouse hunt, he’s got several ruffed grouse that he’s bagged, hanging on the wall next to his favorite shotgun.

There’s a picnic basket by his side and a bottle between his legs.

Whether it was the successful day hunting or the bottle that led to the grin, we’ll never know, but it’s Leopold in one of those rare instances of smiling.

Leopold not only hunted birds, but he also had a passion for bird banding, especially at the Shack.

He and the family caught and banded lots of birds.

And the essay “65290” talks about that experience.

65290 is the number on the band of a chickadee that was made notable in that it lived longer than any other chickadee that Aldo had banded.

So “65290 has long since gone to his reward.

“I hope that in his new woods, “great oaks full of ant’s eggs keep falling all day long, “with never a wind to ruffle his composure “or take the edge off his appetite.

And I hope he still wears my band.”

For people who are engaged in bird banding, this is a classic essay because it so beautifully captures the fascination that people have of banding birds and vicariously sort of looking into their lives.

Well, when you go to Aldo Leopold’s journals, you discover that 65290 was a real chickadee, and 65290’s story comes directly out of those field notes.

But when you go back and look at the drafts of this essay, whoops, 65290 was not the original subject of the essay.

Another chickadee was, but during the multiple drafts of this essay, 65290 distinguished himself by living longer than his predecessor and became the subject of the essay.

So that sort of brings us now to the final part of A Sand County Almanac, The Upshot, as Leopold called it, in which he introduces these twin concepts of land health and a land ethic.

These are probably Leopold’s most impactful essays because they introduced to the world essentially a new way of thinking about our relationship with land.

“Land” was the term that Leopold used in place of a more technical, jargony word that we might use today like ecosystems or biosphere.

Land, for Leopold, is the ecosystem.

It’s the community of living things associated with a place.

And the concepts that he presents, first, land health.

This helped Leopold explain to general audiences a concept that he wanted to get across clearly, and that is that ecosystems can become sick, that land can become sick, that they can show symptoms of unhealthiness.

And he used this phrase “land health” because he knew that people would immediately understand what he meant.

We understand what health is and what sickness is in our bodies.

So by contrast, you could understand what was going on in an ecosystem.

A land ethic was perhaps the most important of these two concepts, in that Aldo Leopold lays out a basis for our relationship with the natural world.

And these twin ideas really were the “end result of a life journey,” as he says, “in the course of which I have felt sorrow, “anger, puzzlement, and confusion over the inability of conservation to halt the juggernaut of land abuse.”

This is Leopold’s final thoughts on what he had been learning throughout his entire career.

Land became this holistic concept for him that integrated all of the things that he’d been learning throughout his career.

And he describes it in a number of essays, but in this one in particular he describes, “Conservation is a state of health in the land.

“The land consists of soil, water, plants, and animals, “but land health is more than a sufficiency “of these components.

“It’s a state of vigorous self-renewal in each of them, and in all collectively,” expanding on this idea that ecosystems can become unhealthy.

So for Leopold, once he had these concepts clearly in hand, his challenge was, how do we get, especially here in the Midwest on privately-owned lands, how do we get landowners to keep their land in a healthy state?

And Leopold, through multiple attempts, becomes somewhat frustrated that most of the tools didn’t seem to work.

“We tried to get conservation by buying land, “by subsidizing desirable changes in land use, “and by passing restrictive laws.

“The last method largely failed; the other two have produced only small samples of success.”

That led him ultimately to ethics, a conscience as a way forward.

“We seem ultimately always thrown back on individual ethics “as the basis of land conservation.

“It’s hard to make a man, by pressure of law or money, “do a thing which does not spring naturally from his own personal sense of right and wrong.”

His own personal conscience.

So the end result for Leopold is the land ethic.

“The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries “of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively, the land.”

Leopold is, again, using a common understanding.

People know that we live in human communities.

And within human communities, there have to be some basic rules on how you live successfully in that community.

Leopold similarly says, we also live in ecological communities, and in the same way, there have to be some rules on how we live and behave in that community.

So “A land ethic, then, reflects the existence “of an ecological conscience, a moral compass, if you will.

“And this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibilities for the health of the land.”

This idea of conservation basically being an ethical question of right and wrong was Leopold’s perhaps most enduring contribution.

It formed eventually the ethical foundations of the modern environmental movement.

Leopold died, of course, way too young, at age 61, before he could really flesh out these ideas perhaps further, but he did leave us a maxim.

Maxims are great; these terse little statements that embody a very complex topic, but give you that compass.

And for Leopold, in the essay “The Land Ethic,” he says, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, “stability, and beauty of the biotic community.

It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

A golden rule that can be applied to virtually all human interactions with nature.

So these two, these essays in The Upshot, as I said, become some of the most enduring and influential of the entire book.

So how did this book actually come to be?

As I hinted earlier, this is a book that might never have happened.

Leopold began working on this book in 1942.

It was the war years.

As a professor at the University of Wisconsin, most of his male students were off at war.

He had a lot of time on his hands, and he devoted them to compiling essays that he had previously written and writing new essays.

He started farming the manuscript around over a four-year period, from 1944 to 1948, when the manuscript is soundly rejected by multiple publishers.

Finally, in April of 1948, Oxford University Press agrees to publish his book, which Leopold had titled Great Possessions, not A Sand County Almanac.

A week later, April 21, 1948, Leopold dies of a heart attack, helping a neighbor fight a grass fire.

And finally, a year later, on the 20th of October, 1949, the book appears as A Sand County Almanac.

Oxford University Press was concerned that Leopold’s title, Great Possessions, was a little too close to the titles of some other books that were in print at the time.

So the book became A Sand County Almanac, a title that Aldo Leopold would recognize as the heading for the first part of the book, but would not have recognized as a title.

So I said it almost never happened.

The rejection letters were sometimes pretty hard to take.

Here, Alfred Knopf says, “You know, we kind of like those cute essays “in the first part of the book, “but man, the second part of the book, “that emphasis on ecological ideas “that you’ve incorporated into your manuscript, “it seems to us that these ecological theories are very difficult to present successfully to the layman.”

That’s the land ethic.

That’s the essence of the book that they’re rejecting it because of.

So Leopold, not to be undone, goes to Macmillan.

And Macmillan really puts him down hard.

“We do not feel that a volume of essays on outdoor topics “would find a wide enough market to warrant our use of paper at this time.”

Ouch, that hurt.

But eventually, Oxford University Press decides, yes, “It was agreed that we are to publish your book, “Great Possessions, as illustrated by Charles Schwartz.”

So Leopold had the phone call and a few days later the formal letter, but then April 21, 1948, Leopold dies at age 61.

And it fell essentially to his family and colleagues to bring the book to completion and publication.

So what happened after 1949?

It turns out the publishers who’d rejected the manuscript were absolutely right.

There was hardly any readership for this type of book.

Sales were very poor for the first 20 years.

And it wasn’t really until 1966, when Oxford University Press came out with a paperback edition, that just happened either by brilliant marketing or dumb luck to correspond with the emergence of the modern environmental movement, when, now, 20 years after Leopold had written about these ideas, there was an audience ready to read them and understand what he was getting at.

Since then, sales of A Sand County Almanac have literally been exponential.

It’s been translated into 15 languages, sold millions of copies, and is widely regarded as one of the most influential environmental books written in the 20th century.

And as I said earlier, it still has legs.

It shows no signs of becoming an obsolete book in terms of our relationship with the natural world.

So in closing, Aldo Leopold left us with a number of challenges.

He was not able to live, I suppose he could have lived into the modern environmental movement quite easily, but he left challenges for us to pick up the baton and carry his ideas forward.

And he said, “I have purposely presented the land ethic “as a product of social evolution “because nothing so important as an ethic is ever written.

It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.”

So here we are, 75 years later, the thinking community, that fortunately continues to expand with time, continues to be inspired by Leopold’s ideas and writing, is still striving toward a land ethic 75 years after this little book appeared.

Thank you.

[audience applauding]