sand county, sad country

the edition of the book that i read was supplemented with photographs by gentlemen who retraced aldo's footsteps and lived on the land where he lived. seeing the landscape as he saw it made it all the more real for me. there were these really haunting images of aldo's grinding stone, laying broken under a tree in different seasons. he died of a heart attack fighting a brush fire on his neighbor's land, did you know that?

living in a city is weird and alien to me. reading this book made me really homesick for a place and time that maybe really only exists in my memory. i grew up on about 50 acres of wooded farmland and feel like i keep moving farther and farther away from that life as i grow older. as i grow older, i romanticize the old farm more and more. i get involved with the local green movements and urban beautification projects, but parts of it seem so masturbatory and filled with this weird sense of self-satisfaction. i feel like some people join these local conservation movements because of the image of it and just spout off this meaningless rhetoric. i appreciate anybody who is involved, but it's a strange, sad simulacrum of the real experience.

being in the country is quiet and leads your mind down quiet roads. i feel like leopold's conservation ethic is borne out of this experience. he focuses on the harmonious co-existence of man and nature, something that a city by its nature defies. i guess the book made me feel dissatisfied with my half-acre plot of city land and small raised vegetable beds. i definitely started feeling like the grass is greener everywhere but here.