On this day, January 11, in 1887, Aldo Leopold entered this world. Leopold was an American author, scientist, ecologist, forester, and environmentalist, and founder of the science of wildlife management. His book, A Sand County Almanac, has sold over 2 million copies since it was first published in 1949, a year after Leopold died of a heart attack while helping a neighbor battle a fire. In 1977, 29 years after Leopold died, the book won a John Burroughs Medal, one of the highest honors for a natural history book.
I bought A Sand County Almanac when I was in earning my degree in Wildlife Management at the University of Tennessee. The only copy I could afford was a used paperback that I bought in the campus bookstore. A rubber band kept the pages from falling out. From the moment I read the first words until the very end, Leopold’s philosophy struck a chord with me. In a way, he was one of my mentors. His philosophy about land influenced my thoughts about environmental responsibility, but it was his love and connection to his land in Baraboo, Wisconsin that impressed me the most—his knowledge of the birds, the trees, and the wildflowers in his community.
In honor of Leopold, I begin this “Williamson County Almanac” and plan to continue throughout 2014 each month. Each month will begin from a quote for the corresponding month from A Sand County Almanac. The basis of these blogs will be to follow Leopold’s desire to shift values by “reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of terms of things natural, wild, and free.”
On February 5, from 7:00–8:30, storyteller Jim Pfitzer will play Leopold at the Troutt Theater @ Belmont Heights in Nashville. The play is titled “A Standard of Change” which explores Leopold’s journey to the writing of A Sand County Almanac. The play is part of the 9th Annual Environmental Science Lecture sponsored by Belmont University.