For seven decades, Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac has been inspiring readers across the globe. With over a dozen translations published and millions of copies sold, it remains a classic recommendation among lovers of nature and literature. Written as a descriptive narrative, yet with an urgent message, Leopold reaches readers with a timeless call: to understand the interconnectedness of our natural world, our place in it, and our responsibility to care for it.
As we co
mmence the next epoch and approach this year’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, we mark the significance of these coinciding events with the release of a new edition of A Sand County Almanac. More than just a timeless message, A Sand County Almanac shares a timely vision for a land ethic gravely needed in today’s world. The new edition, to be released by Oxford University Press in April 2020, will include a new introduction written by novelist and biologist Barbara Kingsolver.
To have a book that stands the test of time is rare. It is with great pleasure we share with you words from other authors who attest to the importance of A Sand County Almanac.
“Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac was my first book of nature writing and changed my view of the world with such words as: ‘It is warm behind the driftwood now, for the wind has gone with the geese. So would I — if I were the wind.’ I still have my original, yellowed and marked-up copy and will never let it go.”
Delia Owens, wildlife scientist and author of Where the Crawdads Sing
“A Sand County Almanac is the transcendentalist’s field guide to feeling. It’s a compendium of conservation thinking and feeling – and how that head/heart convergence inspires our treatment of nature and one another as indispensable ‘cogs’ in an interlocked existence. It is my spiritual ready reference to our ecological well-being and a how-to on seeing the whole and harmony in wildness.”
Drew Lanham, ecologist and author of The Home Place
“The emergent science of the 20th century was ecology with its central insight that everything was connected to everything else. It took ecology to bring us to this notion of community, of things being deeply connected and Leopold was the key translator of that idea.”
Bill McKibben, educator, environmentalist, and author of The End of Nature
“Following the first Earth Day in April 1970, I rashly volunteered to offer a course in ‘environmental ethics’ at UWSP, the first of its kind in the world. I had no idea what to teach. Until, that is, a former student loaned me his copy of A Sand County Almanac. It instantly became the centerpiece of the course and has remained its centerpiece ever since.”
Baird Callicott, philosopher and author of Thinking Like a Planet
“A Sand County Almanac found me as a ninth-grade assignment. That worn copy still sits near my desk. More than his images of land and seasons in place, Leopold’s call for an extension of ethics prompted questions that have defined my path in work and life.”
Lauret E. Savoy, Earth historian and author of Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
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