Sand County

So obviously A Sand County Almanac isn't a complex work of fiction like Rabbit, Run, and there's not as much to parse. But I think what's most interesting about reading this book is the way it shows how conservationism has changed over the years.

I think Leopold is right even still when he says that very few people are interested in conservation for conservation's sake. You have to attach a price tag on it somehow. In Leopold's day they did that by mostly saying that fucked up land was land that couldn't be used to make any money. Today we do that by saying the world's going to be all fucked up for the kids when they get older, global warming is going to launch tsunamis at us, etc, etc. It's hard to argue that you shouldn't clear cut forests because that's just a total dick move.

I also think it's interesting how interwoven hunting is with Leopold's environmentalism. That also just seems completely alien today. When he first started talking about shooting ducks I was kind of shocked, because now we think of environmentalists more or less as hippies who want to preserve every last living thing. But, as he points out, hunting can serve a genuinely good ecological purpose if, say, the wolves in your neighborhood aren't doing a very good job of making sure the deer don't eat all the young trees.

Anyway I picked this book before I had read any of it, and I'm glad I did. It's a pretty good book that I'd never heard of before, and is evidently some kind of landmark in nature writing. It's pretty crazy that this book was published in the late 40s, when most of America just wanted to take the axe to nature in the name of chrome-plated Shining Progress.