with less than subsistence-level effort, we also had the time to appreciate the things of nature. Yet, at the same time we found that we had progressed to a level where we were destroying those things. They achieved value and lost value at the same time.
For much of this book, Leopold reports on things observed in his wanderings through the different types of non-developed regions of Sand County, noting the animals he has observed and their behaviors, the plants encountered, and some of the feelings engendered in him by his wanderings. His own spiritual development is related to these experiences, and he uses some specific experiences as a way of saying more about the world and about our place in it. For instance, he cuts down an oak tree for firewood and muses on the history through which this tree has lived, a history reflected in the rings of the tree. The rings also indicate the traumas that occurred in the vicinity of the oak, from droughts to lightning strikes. As the saw cuts through the rings of the tree, Leopold notes the changes that were taking place in the environment in each year and the ways in which progress in one area meant damage in another, as in the following passage:
Now the saw bites into 1910-1920, the decade of the drainage dream, when the shovels sucked dry the marches of central Wisconsin to make farms, and made ash-heaps instead (11).
Of course, as the saw cuts, it carries us back through time, and the litany of destruction offered by Leopold shows that our destructive habits are not new and did not begin in this century. The final cut takes us into an era Leopold sees as the beginning of concern for wild things--1865, when John Muir offered to buy land from his brother for a sanctuary for wildflowers: "1865 still sta
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