A Sand County Almanac
This is an excerpt from the paper...
In A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold presents a series of portraits of nature and the natural landscape, coupled with related musings on life, the environment, and man's place in this world. The approach taken is not dissimilar to a tradition in American literature extending back through such writers as Emerson and Thoreau. both of whom also used observations of nature to glean philosophical and practical knowledge of themselves and their world. In the Preface to the Enlarged Edition, the author's children note that the book was originally published in 1949 after Leopold's death and that much of what he discusses in this book, offering his insight into the American landscape and to our need to preserve and enjoy it, has passed into common currency, though much distorted. In 1966 when this edition was published, roadside beautification had replaced "the harmony between man and land that Aldo Leopold knew and taught" (xiv). The younger Leopolds write: The America that declares the preservation of natural beauty to be public policy is at the same time planning to build dams in two areas of great natural value. Bills are now before Congress to construct power dams in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado that would essentially kill the living river and flood a large part of this unique natural heritage (xiv). Leopold places himself right from the start with those who cannot live without wild things, and these are the things that are disappearing in a world where progress m
. . .
dicates the belief that nature is not simply something standing outside human experience but is rather history itself. The rings of the tree are an obvious expression of this idea, but every type of plant and animal has a history and embodies the history of life on this planet. Leopold sees the destruction of the habitat, or of a single species in that habitat, as the destruction of history. He further sees the protection of the environment as an ethical question, and the proper attitude for successful ecological field study is an ethical view of our relationship to nature and of the need to preserve the wild things of this world.
Indeed, Leopold goes further and sees ethics itself as a process in ecological evolution:
It sequences may be described in ecological as well as in philosophical terms. An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of the same thing (238).
In the world as it presently exists, though, there is no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the plants and animals on that land, for land is still property: "The land-relation is still str
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Indeed Leopold, United Nations, Sand County, Highway Department, John Muir, Canyon Colorado, Aldo Leopold, Enlarged Edition, Madison Wisconsin, Emerson Thoreau, field study, ecological field, ecological field study, land ethic, rings tree, plants animals, natural world, successful ecological field, sand county, successful ecological, mercy natural wild, john muir, sand county almanac, natural wild, plants animals land,
Approximate Word count = 2150
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
More Essays on A Sand County Almanac
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
