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A Sand County Almanac By Aldo Leopold

901 Words4 Pages

Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac proposes different perspectives on human interactions with the environment. The known father of wildlife conservation, Aldo Leopold, articulates an unprecedented idea called “land ethic” which upholds the right of the soils, waters, animals, and plants to a life in a natural state. The book itself is a series of discrete essays as Leopold seeks the ecology of his farm in the sand country of Wisconsin, a poor part of the country with infertile soil. In short pieces, he writes of each month of the year, talking of hunting, fishing, watching wildlife, understanding the land, migrating birds, and trees. The finishing pieces consist of excellent essays about different parts of the country, the wilderness ethic, …show more content…

His understanding of the necessity for wildness occurred when he kills one of the area’s few remaining wolves, and watching “the fierce green fire” die in the wolf’s eye, he realized that much of what he had learned was wrong. Leopold became one of America’s first advocated for wilderness, which also included spearheading protection for the high country of the Gila National Forest in southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona in 1924. Soon after, this area was later announced as the Aldo Leopold Wilderness.
The Sand County’s essay stressed the importance of concerns for the need for wild spaces and that we will lose something is and when they disappear. Although Leopold is no longer around to witness the conservation going on, many is surprised to see how his work had influenced the modern wilderness movement and the amount of land now protected. He’s been less surprised to find the development ethic alive and well in the United States and the loss of millions of acres of land to development in areas not traditionally considered beautiful by western

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