Aldo leopold a sand county almanac pdf

The resulting layout is spectacular. But the heart of the book remains Leopold's carefully rendered observations of nature. Here we follow Leopold throughout the year, from January to December, as he walks about the rural Wisconsin landscape, watching a woodcock dance skyward in golden afternoon light, or spying a rough-legged hawk dropping like a feathered bomb on its prey. And perhaps most important are Leopold's trenchant comments throughout the book on our abuse of the land and on what we must do to preserve this invaluable treasure.

This edition also includes two of Leopold's most eloquent essays on conservation, "The Land Ethic" and "Marshland Elegy. Written with an unparalleled understanding of the ways of nature, the book includes a section on the monthly changes of the Wisconsin countryside; another part that gathers informal pieces written by Leopold over a forty-year period as he traveled through the woodlands of Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona, Sonora, Oregon, Manitoba, and elsewhere; and a final section in which Leopold addresses the philosophical issues involved in wildlife conservation.

A pioneering forester, sportsman, wildlife manager, and ecologist, he was also a gifted writer whose farsighted land ethic is proving increasingly relevant in our own time.

Published in , it remains a vivid, firsthand, philosophical tour de force. Along with Sand County are more than fifty articles, essays, and lectures exploring the new complexities of ecological science and what we would now call environmental ethics. Also unique to this collection is a selection of over letters, most of them never before published, tracing his personal and professional evolution and his efforts to foster in others the love and sense of responsibility he felt for the land.

The Library of America series includes more than volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1, pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries. Comparison with the genuinely Other-based Leopold-Ortega-Beston-Shepard wild-animal ethic shows the purportedly Other-based hu- man and possibly animal ethic of Emmanuel Levinas actually to be Same-based after all.

Baird Callicott, ed. Baird Callicott and Clare Palmer, eds. Here we propose to engage the more descriptive essays in A Sand County Almanac using the resources of continental philosophy, more than those of Anglo-American, with a focus on animal Others. We go on to consider how the work of ecophilosopher Paul Shepard extends the Self transforma- tion achieved through encounter with the animal Other implicit in A Sand County Almanac and how it complements the transformed metaphysics of the Self gained by reflection on the animal Other.

Finally, we conclude with a seeming paradox: that both Leopold and Shepard, while expressing a deep admiration and even af- fection for wild animals, were avid and unapologetic sport hunters, pursuing and 3 See Gary K. Meffe and C. Sunderland, Mass. We verified the associated claim by examining the annual index of Environmental Ethics.

Further, examining the footnotes of each issue of Environmental Ethics indicates that Leopold is cited in practi- cally every number of this journal.

Bouchard and Sherry Simon, trans. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. What is it about sport hunting that, for Leopold and Shepard, is among the noblest and highest expressions of the human relationship with some wild animal Others?

The Spanish existential philosopher Jose Ortega y Gassett provides the key to dispelling that paradox. Leopold was trained in the then new applied science of forestry at the Yale For- est School, which was founded in by Gifford Pinchot.

Forest Service, which had been created by Congress in Leopold left the forest service in and pioneered a new applied science, game management, following the model of forestry. Most importantly and generally, Leopold is adamant that science alone is inadequate for a comprehensive understanding of the world. Science may inform metaphysics and ethics, but it cannot supercede or eclipse them.

That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten. These essays attempt to weld these three concepts. In addition to game management, Leopold pioneered another descriptive science, phenology—observing and recording the seasonal arrival and departure of birds, the leafing of trees, the budding, flowering, and seed-setting of forbs, etc.

Fitz Roy, R. London: John Murray, Rather ecology scientific natural history , in part, and certainly phenology, also only in part, are concerned with describing directly observed and experienced phenomena. Thus, although Leopold was certainly not a phenomenologist, he was engaged in disciplined observation and description together with introspective self-reflection, not altogether unlike that in which phenomenologists engage. The author is awakened by dripping water on an unseasonably warm, mid-winter morning and goes out of his cabin to see what the thaw has aroused.

New York: Cambridge University Press, As Dennis Ribbens explains, the county name was changed—by exactly whom is not known—in the process of posthumous editing. I wonder what he has on his mind; what got him out of bed?

Can one impute romantic motives to this corpulent fellow, dragging his ample beltline through the slush? Finally the track enters a pile of driftwood, and does not emerge. I hear the tinkle of dripping water among the logs, and I fancy the skunk hears it too. Through his narrative style, Leopold basically induces us, as readers, to engage in the same search that he endeavors—namely, to probe the mind of an animal Other. Through the course of his descriptions, the intersubjective world is unfurled.

Leopold ends at the pile of driftwood. As Husserl em- phatically declares, I am positioned as equal in relation to every other as constituting co-bearer of the world. As I myself, so also is every other necessary for the existence of the world—the very same world that is for me real and objective. I cannot think away any other without giving up this world. No determinate other subject and, by implication, no indeterminate other, anticipated in the open horizon-sense, is to be thought away.

While in no sense located in that tradition, Leopold is aligned with it in portraying humans as having no monopoly on inten- tional consciousness. Many animal Others are intentional subjects as well; they too enjoy intentional consciousness, no less than we. He is very much present as perceiver, experiencing animal Others as objects, yes, but he also acknowledges them as perceiving, experiencing subjects in their own right.

This deceptively simple narrative situates Leopold and us, his readers, as one kind of being among many Others, whose minds may still not be known—indeed, they may not be knowable—but who, nevertheless, co-constitute the world. As we see, Leopold unapologetically personifies and anthropomorphizes the Other members of his biotic community.

Is that consistent with the descriptive evolutionary-ecological world view that, according to Peter Fritzell, he is trying to convey? How could geese possibly be aware of the Wisconsin statutes?! One is apt to impute a disconsolate tone to their honkings and to jump to the conclusion that they are broken-hearted widowers, or mothers hunting lost children.

From the point of view of the prevailing now as then, we fear positivistic scientism, one cannot. Leopold, however, does not claim to know, but only to impute, imagine, and fancy. Phenom- enologists concur. Of course, one cannot, however, directly observe the consciousness of an animal Other.

But neither can one directly observe the consciousness of another human 32 Ibid. Yet we are—ornithologists and laypersons alike—perfectly confident that we correctly impute to other human beings both thoughts and feel- ings. On what grounds is such confidence based? So, how can we convince our positivistic-scientistic selves the ornithologists that therefore we are , at least of this: that we can be as confident of the existence of other nonhuman animal subjects as we are of the existence of other human subjects?

In short, on the basis of analogy, Other people look, more or less, like we look. To the extent that animals look like us many have four appendages, noses, eyes, ears, mouths and act like us many startle, flee, play, stalk, sigh, yawn, whimper, socialize , by way of a similar analogy we may just as legitimately conclude that they think and feel, more or less, like we think and feel. So, as it turns out, the determination to believe that animals are unconscious automata is a legacy of pre-Darwinian as well as pre- phenomenological metaphysics.

Animals are not only different from humans, they are different from one another, a difference to which philosophers especially have been insensitive. In The Animal that Therefore I Am, which was left unfinished at his death and published posthumously, Derrida observes that what all nonhuman animals do have in common—which obscures, especially for philosophers, the myriad differences among them—is that they are Other than human.

In his book on the animal Other, Derrida reaches deeply into the roots of the Western world view—both Hebrew and Greek, ancient and modern—for clues to the systematic devaluation and domination of animals in the culture shaped by that world view. For us, the states of mind of skunks and mice may be more reliably imagined than the emotions of geese—because mice and skunks are mammals, as are we, while geese are not.

What do frogs feel and fish think? Leopold thus counters a cultural prejudice regarding animals originating with biblical exclusionism and reinforced by Cartesian-Newtonian scientism. Up there you could not see the mountain, but you could feel it. The reason was the big bear. The implicit bear literally animated the mountain. Nor was Leopold alone in sensing the presence of the perceptually absent bear.

Everyone in that region at that time even the most hard-bitten cowboys had the same heightened experience as Leopold, though doubtless few were consciously aware of it or reflected on it. The pigeon of the title is the extinct passenger pigeon, in commemoration of which a monument had been erected in Wyalusing State Park by the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology.

We know now what was unknown to the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other species in the odyssey of evolution. Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.

These things, I say, should have come to us. I fear they have not come to many. Like the bear on Escudilla, wolves animated the landscape of the Southwest. It tingles the spine of all who hear wolves at night, or scan their tracks by day. Even out of sight or sound of wolf, it is implicit in a hundred small events: the midnight whinny of a pack horse, the rattle of rolling rocks, the bound of a fleeing deer, the way shadows lie under spruces. Only the ineducable tyro can fail to sense the presence or absence of wolves.

I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes— something known only to her and to the mountain. But seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain would agree with such a view. After the experience that it describes, there followed a personal transformation, a conversion, as it were, from one state of being to another.

Leopold left the church of anthropocentric, utilitarian resource conservation, which he had joined at Yale. He eventually went on to found the new nonanthropocentric, deontological church of evolutionary-ecological ethics. Saul of Tarsus became Paul the Apostle. Following the killing of the Wolf and seeing the dying flame in her eyes, Leopold was born again, no longer the same person as before.

Or so this narrative is crafted to suggest. They play the role of the new Genesis in this new holy writ. Yet Homo sapiens is spectacularly different from all other animal species in that very capacity which has so fascinated continental philosophers: the quality and power of the human subject, human consciousness, the human mind.

We are thinking animals; if not uniquely thinking animals, then certainly, among all animals, we specialize and excel in thinking. In The Descent of Man, Darwin himself speculated on the evolution of human intelligence, among other signal, and closely associated, human capacities—such as language and ethics.

There, going beyond Leopold, he explores the way intersubjective interaction with animal Others not only changes our understanding of what it means to be human, intersubjective interaction with animal Others is indeed what made Homo sapiens human.

Ironically, according to Shepard, it was the human relationship to animals that created a metaphysical lacuna between humans and animals—if indeed there is such a lacuna. While Shepard is certainly working in the tradition pioneered by Darwin in De- scent, is he also consciously extending the insights of Leopold in A Sand County Almanac?

Rather the theory of evolution, for both Leopold and Shepard, represents a new Genesis, a mythic alternative to the bibli- cal account of creation, with powerful religious overtones. Leopold and Shepard both appreciate what few others have: that the theory of evolution and ecology can touch in us a deep spiritual chord and represents not only a new scientific world view but, potentially, a new religious world view.

Evolutionary thinking gives me relat- edness, continuity with the past, common ground with other life, a kind of celebration of diversity. Yes, there is. That would be Rudolph Bennitt, a quail man, who was a family friend of the Shepards; and the place of study would be the University of Missouri.

By the time I left Columbia, Missouri, in the summer of , Leopold was dead and we had all seen his new book, A Sand County Almanac, published posthumously.

Those three years and that book framed the question that has dogged me ever since. Shepard graduated from the University of Missouri in , with a double major in English literature and wildlife conservation. He completed his Ph. Evelyn Hutchinson.

Just how does Shepard think that animals made us human? Concepts are the currency of human thought. Concepts are mental pigeonholes by means of which we sort, identify, organize, and connect sensorially experienced objects.

We now think by means of a congeries of incredibly rich, complex, and multifaceted con- ceptual schemata, which include such domains as types of popular music blues, rock, punk, funk, metal, disco, rap, hip-hop, emo , literary genres novels, novel- las, short stories, memoir, biography, autobiography, nature writing, poetry , fur- niture tables, chairs, couches, love seats, armoires, chests-of-drawers , elements hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, oxygen, uranium , and so on and so on.

Animals do not come in a continuum—wolf, wolf-wolf-cougar, wolf-cougar, cougar-cougar-wolf, cougar. Any given animal fits neatly and unambiguously into a single mental pigeonhole, a single conceptual category—although, of course, there is the phenomenon of hybridization among different species of the same genus. Except in the case of hybrids, an animal is either a wolf, a cougar, or something else quite definite—a coyote, a bobcat, or whatever.

The original pattern for all subsequent human think- ing, according to Shepard, is thinking animals. Why then is Homo sapiens the thinking animal par excellence? That is, why are we the only hyper-thinking species? A cornerstone evolutionary assumption of The Descent of Man, no less than of The Origin of Species, is natura non facit saltus.

Nature does not make jumps; there are no leaps in evolutionary development. Most evolutionary anthropologies, after Darwin, cleave to the same assumptions: for there to have evolved an animal as thoughtful as Homo sapiens, there must have first evolved less thoughtful kinds of thinking animals from which Homo sapiens evolved, and there must be less thoughtful kinds of animals still around that share in this evolved capacity, but to a lesser degree.

The quintessentially thinking animal could have evolved, according to Shepard, only as an omnivorous primate. Why a primate? For several reasons. Brain size and a high brain-to-body ratio— called the encephalization quotient EQ —is one. Primates have a high EQ. For another, primates are intensely social and sociability implies self-awareness and constant re-assessment of the social status of oneself. High-end thinking involves a rich interiority, an introspective and reflec- tive consciousness.

And why an omnivore? Because an omnivore combines the kinds of consciousness typical of both predator and prey. Predators attend to other species, to the point of fixation, but seem not to be self-reflective.

Prey are more self-aware and diffusely alert. Human thinking, according to Shepard, evolved in a self-aware social animal that had the brain capacity required for thinking many and big thoughts and an orientation of attention to other species—the taxonomic order of which provided the exemplar for all subsequent conceptual schemata. A necessary condition for the evolution of human thinking is the evolution of language.

Or, perhaps more precisely, language is the objective correlative of thought. Words, according to Shepard, call stereotypical images of absent things to mind. In The Others as in Thinking Animals, Shepard pays homage to the minds of the large animals that shared the ecological theater—the African savannah—on which the drama of hu- man evolution was staged.

The circumstances in which a series of large carnivores and herbivores became more thoughtful, by watching, pursuing, evading, stalking, hiding, mimicking, and otherwise seeking to comprehend and anticipate each other, set the stage and the terms of our presence, as though we had won a role in a play that had been running for years.

The four-legged carnivores and their prey had long since learned that an animal, watched long enough, gradually dissolved into signs. It left the marks that came to represent it: footprints, urine, secretions, feces, molted antlers, scratchings and rubbings, gnawed 52 Ibid. But he seems to agree with Heidegger on one key point. Our human specialty was to dislodge those signs from a momentary stuckness in place and time and build a mental world of them that could be played over at times of our choosing.

Loving animals implied killing them; but more to the point, killing them should imply loving them. How is that possible? It is partly a matter of an accident of American history. Although our current national and global narrative of a downward spiraling environmental decline makes it hard to imagine, at the turn of the twentieth century there were fewer wild ani- mals in the lower forty-eight states than there were at the turn of the twenty-first. The passenger pigeon had been hunted to outright extinction.

The remaining bison numbered only in the hundreds. Seeing a deer in New England was so noteworthy as to be the subject of a newspaper article. It was wealthy, aristocratic, politically well-connected sport hunters—the most prominent of which was Theodore Roosevelt, both twenty-sixth President of the United States and a founder of the Boon and Crockett Club—who championed wildlife conservation. They even negotiated treaties with Mexico and Canada to protect migratory waterfowl from indiscriminate hunting.

If, however, we were to pick a single thing that was the common denominator of all the other things he was, we would say that, above all or beneath all , he was a conservationist. For Leopold, whose formative years and first job came during the Theodore Roosevelt administration, to be a conservationist and to be a sport hunter were to be practically the same thing.

When my father gave me the shotgun, he said I might hunt partridges with it, but that I might not shoot them from trees. I was old enough, he said, to learn wing shooting. My dog was good at treeing partridge, and to forego a sure shot in the tree in favor of a hopeless one at the fleeing bird was my first exercise in ethical codes. Compared with a treed partridge, the devil and his seven kingdoms was a mild temptation.

Michael Scott, Dale D.