69 pages • 2 hours read
Aldo LeopoldA Sand County Almanac
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BetaPart 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
“Country”-“The Round River” Summary
Leopold opens Part 3 with a description of the difference between “land” and “country,” with the former describing cultivated land suitable for human purposes, and the latter referring to land that supports a wide array of species, where a drab exterior can belie a rich diversity of life.
Leopold describes one way to interact with country: through the cultivation of a hobby, which he describes as something that “must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant” (182). As an example, he cites an old German merchant who had a cottage in the town where Leopold grew up and used to collect fossil samples of ancient creatures called crinoids from ledges along the Mississippi River. After his death, the town realized that the old man’s eccentric hobby had in fact made him a world expert on crinoids. As another example, Leopold points to falconry; years of patient effort are needed to train a falcon to kill a heron, which is inedible, and this process can easily go wrong, yielding a useless hunter or an escaped bird, making it “the perfect hobby” (184). That humans have the capacity for useless pursuits, which sometimes run against the grain of conventional society, is the highest accomplishment possible for a social animal, Leopold concludes.
In the next section, Leopold moves on to a different kind of community: that that exists between humans and the landscape, and between elements of that landscape themselves. Conservation creates a harmonious relationship between humans and the land, which in turn preserves the interrelationship between species and elements in an ecosystem; the realization that these parts are interconnected in complex ways, Leopold writes, is the greatest scientific discovery of the 20th century. American conservation, however, is excessively focused on charismatic species, or “show pieces,” and ignores the importance of a stable and diverse ecosystem in its entirety. This leads to policies such as state bounties for the hunting of wolves—which result in an overpopulation of deer and rabbits. Soil is a particularly important part of these ecosystems, but much of the richness of soil, created through millennia by stable and diverse ecosystems, has been lost due to modern agricultural practices; the resulting declines in crop production are offset by technological improvements, but such measures yield only temporary benefit. In the closing of this section, Leopold notes that what is ultimately missing in conservation is an ethical base for the valuation of land, and a better understand of how ecosystems function as a whole, rather than in their constituent parts.
“Natural History” Summary
In “Natural History,” Leopold opens with a description of two middle-aged farmers planting tamarack trees on their farm to create a marshy area where wildflowers and other plants can grow. Even though this exercise runs counter to economic logic, it is born out love and respect for the land, similar to that parents have for their children; it is “not only a chance to make a living but also a chance to express and develop a rich and varied assortment of inherent capabilities, both wild and tame” (203).
These kinds of non-lucrative activities aren’t only rewarding for the land; they are also important for people, particularly amateurs in the natural sciences. As examples, he cites an industrial chemist who learned more about the life and extinction of the passenger pigeon than any other living person, or Margaret Rose Nice, an Ohio housewife who became an expert on song sparrows simply by banding and observing them in her backyard for over a decade. This kind of direct observation of nature, however, has disappeared from formal scientific education, Leopold notes, due to the history of biology as a discipline, whereby laboratory biology arose at a time when natural history was stagnating, making laboratory studies dominant. As a result, students in the field have become divorced from the land and from the appreciation of the relationships between elements of that landscape.
In “Wildlife in American Culture,” Leopold writes that connection with wildness has an important role to play in culture: It reminds people in the United States of their national origins (specifically, in the fur trade); it connects people to their position in the food chain of soils, plants, and animals, which is otherwise obscured by industrial agriculture and civilization; and it develops people’s ethical sensibilities, particular those that exist in the notion of sportsmanship, or restraint in the hunting of wild things. Technological advances in hunting equipment have imperiled the ability of sportsmanship to nourish the general culture, just as a decline in the value of sportsmanship has encouraged more people to use hunting technology without restraint. This technology renders hunting less satisfying for many hunters, though few, Leopold things, would be able to identify the cause of the shift. Leopold goes on to cite examples of activities that could increase this value, including raising game in the wild, which requires restraint and connection to the land, and wildlife research.
Wildlife research is sometimes regarded as the domain of professionals, but it is enhanced by amateurs, a dynamic borne out by insights about species ranging from bald eagles to mountain lion, thanks to the observations of amateurs. Having more people engaged in this activity not only would be to their benefit, Leopold writes, but would serve the wider society as well.
Part 3 Analysis
In Part 3, Leopold turns to an analysis of land, hobbies, and culture, noting that what is often held as unproductive in the first two nourishes the third; in other words, that land that is not forced to conform to human purposes, and time spent on that land without a goal of creating economic value sustains the nationalism, consciousness of origins, and ethic of sportsmanship that in turn creates a healthy culture.
In “A Man’s Leisure Time,” Leopold describes hobbies as useless activities—the more inefficient, the better. While this discussion may initially seem to be a digression from his discussion of the value of wildness, it is soon clear that they are closely connected. On the one hand, Leopold describes a hobby as “an assertion of those permanent values which the momentary eddies of social evolution have contravened or overlooked” (182). In describing hobbies as defying the temporal changes of society, Leopold is drawing a parallel with the discussion earlier in the book of certain landscapes as existing outside human timescales. Thus the radical exercise of leisure time can put people in closer connection with the wildness that exists outside of social structures. Hobbies also exist out of time in another way in that they can help create a legacy that endures through generations; Leopold closes the section by noting that he has three sons in whom he’s instilled a love of hunting as a hobby as well as providing them with a good education and good health, but he wonders what they’ll do with this inheritance if there is nothing left to hunt and no wilderness left in which to wander.
Hobbies are also connected to wildness in that many people’s hobbies involve passing time in nature, either as hunters or as observers. Nonetheless, the increasing use of advanced hunting technology has undermined the value of hunting as a leisure activity, making hunting too productive and out of step with natural systems. The observation of the natural world, on the other hand, has the capacity not only to increase appreciation and understanding of the natural world, but also to enhance culture by increasing understanding of human societies through the study of animal analogues to human behavior.
The discussion of hobbies is significant in another way in that it highlights the limitations of the formal scientific disciplines. This idea harkens back to Leopold’s discussion of the wisdom contained in nature earlier in the book, but in Part 3, he focuses on the divide between amateur wildlife researchers and the professionals found in universities. In the 20th century, science had made significant progress in recognizing the interconnected nature of ecosystems. However, an appreciation of this interconnection is limited by the divide between laboratory and field biology, where “the living animal is virtually omitted from the present system of zoological education” (206). Despite this divide, tools exist to render field biology as rigorous as that conducted in the library, a fact demonstrated by the important discoveries made by amateurs studying a variety of species in their leisure time—proof that the knowledge contained in university libraries has not caught up to the wisdom on display in the natural world.
Another consequence of this divide discussed in Part 3 is the divide between economic value and the value contained in the natural world. This discrepancy picks up on the discussion, earlier in the book, in which Leopold noted that landscapes are often modified—such as a marsh drained—to reap the short-term economic benefits, with little thought to the ecological consequences or even the long-term economic implications. In Part 3, Leopold notes that this thinking creates damage that is slow to heal—such as in the case of the Spessart Mountain, where one slope was cleared for pasture in the Middle Ages and still had not recovered due to changes in the soil structure as a result of forest clearing—or is irreversible, as Leopold fears may be the case with “goose music,” the honking of geese as they travel across the landscape, sparking “who knows what questionings and memories and hopes” (229). The preservation of this music is antithetical to human systems of economic value but would deal an irretrievable loss to human culture. While this approach to nature may give some people material wealth to hand down to their children, it also deprives those children of another crucial element of their inheritance: a wild world in which to pass their leisure time, free of the strictures of society.
In the discussion on goose music Leopold argues that wildlife serves another purpose: that of a social asset. However, correctly valuing the asset that wildlife represents is challenging. Nonetheless, the consequences of losing that music are clear: While human music can ultimately be re-created, Leopold writes that the honking of geese can never be replaced, once it’s gone.
