Summary Of Sand County Almanac By Aldo Leopold

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“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.” This essay is about one who cannot. Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold exposes a profound and fundamental detachment between contemporary people and the land. This detachment based on mechanization, individualization, consumerism, materialism, and capitalism is leading mankind down an un-returnable path that seeks to destroy the land that we love. Nevertheless, Aldo Leopold writes about the delicate intricacies that intertwine to form an infinite system linked together by relationships that still escape understanding.
As Leopold’s story progresses he reveals an unparalleled wisdom flowing from his interaction and experience living as a piece of the ecological community—not as a separate machine, but as a cog within a greater and more infinitely complex system. Numerous examples flow from his simple yet fundamentally different perspective. Leopold writes, “The autobiography of an old board is a kind of literature not yet taught on campuses, but any riverbank farm is a library where he who …show more content…

Our system today is inherently opposed to developing a relationship with the land because it depends on evidence in terms of monetary worth. “One basic weakness in a conservationist system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value” (246). How much is a wildflower or a songbird worth? Therefore, this infinitely complex ecological system, which depends upon an unforeseeable amount of community-shaping mechanisms, tends to become increasingly diseased. “It tends to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial values, but that are (as we know) essential to its healthy functioning” (252).
“Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators”

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