The first weekend of March is officially Aldo Leopold Weekend in Wisconsin making this weekend, March 4th – 6th, this year’s official celebration. However, many communities throughout the United States celebrate Aldo Leopold’s legacy at various times during the month. If you don’t have time to take in some of the planned activities for these celebrations, you might consider taking some time to sit and re-read some of the passages from Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. In his March chapter entitled “The Geese Return,” Leopold talks about the first sightings of the honking geese and their “wild poem” which drops from the sky. We’ve been hearing their poem already. Have you?
You might also locate a screening of Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time near you.
When I teach conservation at the Outagamie Conservation Club Hunter Safety classes, I introduce Aldo Leopold at the Father of Wild life Management. The following taken from the UW-Madison Digital Collections-The Aldo Leopold Archives is a good description of his legacy: Aldo Leopold is considered by many to have been the most influential conservation thinker of the 20th Century. Leopold’s legacy spans the disciplines of forestry, wildlife management, conservation biology, sustainable agriculture, restoration ecology, private land management, environmental history, literature, education, easthetics, and ethics. He is most widely known as the author of A Sand County Almanac, one of the most beloved and respected books about the environment ever published.
Thanks for this information. I remember starting to read “A Sand County Almanac” back in the 1970s, and thinking it was boring – and I didn’t get very far. Forty years later, I picked it up again and found it fascinating and couldn’t put it down.
I’m rereading it now, Chris. It’s been a pleasant sojourn during the morning’s sunrise.
Thanks for the reminder. When I taught “Ecological Principles of Design”, I always
assigned the month of February in which Leopold saws through the lines of natural history while cutting through the “Good Oak”. That brief history of species and habitat loss balanced with conservation movement gains is the stuff that motivates many of us to advocate for the environment, more than 60 years after the publishing of “A Sand County Almanac”. Quotes from Leopold’s book continue to be rallying cries for land managers across the country! One of my favorites is “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” This I found as I read Leopold’s Foreword to Sand County Almanac.
Yes, I agree with you, Bonnie. The entire quote from March that my remarks came from about the geese is “And in this annual barter of food for light, and winter warmth for summer solitude, the whole continent receives as net profit a wild poem dropped from the murky skies upon the muds of March.” His words are so true and so eloquent.