A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold - Book Report/Review Example

A Sand County Almanac: The Humility of Trying to Capture the Essence of Nature A narrative that explores the beautyand elegance of the natural world is never complete. Aldo Leopold takes on the challenge of creating descriptions of nature in his work A Sand County Almanac which is especially well done in his chapter, “Marshland Elegy”. Even he writes about the inability for language to ever fully describe nature when he says “Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language” (Leopold 160). The following paper will examine the descriptions of nature in Aldo Leopold’s work as they are deeply moving and spiritually satisfying, but how it is his humility about the inability of language to capture the true depth of the beauty of nature that provides the best reasons for conserving the natural world. The book begins by saying “There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot” (Leopold 21). Written by Leopold on March 4, 1948, this statement puts in two sentences the nature of his existence within this world and how he was challenged by it. His essays develop a strong argument for conservationism, providing the roots through which the conservation movement was able to take hold. A seminal work on providing context for the concepts that supported the need for conserving the natural world, the descriptions and challenges presented are engaging no matter what level of kinship one feels for nature. There is a passage in his March section which describes the activities of woodcocks in April and May of each year. Leopold missed the ‘dance’ that he describes for the first two years that they lived in the area. After those first two years, however, he describes a ritual of the evening that would begin exactly one minute later each night for those two months. He writes “It is unfortunate, perhaps, that no matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them” (Leopold 41). The use of the concept of data as a way to engage the reader provides human context for the understanding of nature that he creates. When Leopold discusses the woodcocks, he frames their rituals in terms of human understandings. He puts them on a clock that shifts by one minute later every day. He places them in the calendar for performing this ritual through April and May of each year. He creates data that is placed into context in terms that human beings understand. However, the woodcocks likely have no understanding of months or minutes. They follow the cues that nature has provided. It is through modeling that Leopold is able to provide the reader a way in which to relate the natural world to the human world. In his August essay, “The Green Pasture”, Leopold compares the artist to the work of the river as it carves out color and texture onto the sandbar (233). Unlike the human artist whose work lasts for generations to observe, the river paints its work so that only a moment of it exists and in that moment the human memory is all that will preserve it. He uses the model of the painter as the structure in which he interprets the work of the river. As he uses the metaphor of the painter in order to describe what he has observed about the changing imagery. Even in the beauty of the essay as it defines the way in which the river impacts on its environment, he has only created an illusion about its nature. In his essay “Marshland Elegy”, Leopold seemed to experience the way in which the ancient nature of the land was connected to the present in a way that was not linear. The past as it is reflected in the lives of the cranes means that the human interpretation of time may not be as accurate as that of nature. The cyclical nature of life and death as it continues to nourish and feed an ecological system may mean that time is different in the world that exists outside of human interpretation. In trying to understand our world we move forward, valuing each life in a way that takes human existence from one place to the next. The natural world is not the same. In nature, there is no memory of the fox that died yesterday, but there is an ecological impression that remains. Each creature becomes a part of the nourishment and reproduction of the moments that follow. Leopold looks to find methods in which to create a response in the reader. It is this inability to fully capture nature that makes Leopold’s work so compelling. In his fluid and beautiful descriptions he tells his readers about the many ways in which the natural world impacts his own experiences, but never does he claim that he has captured it. What he tries to do is find a way in which to create a response through which the experience of nature is felt by the reader, rather than capturing it without fault. He writes at the end of his “Marshland Elegy” that “all conservation is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish” (Leopold 163). He makes it clear that human beings are not a part of nature and that when human beings engage nature they are intruders. That is the beauty of description. The uniquely human ability to describe and place into memory through artistic rendering the experiences found in nature is something that in all of nature only humans can accomplish. Leopold creates definition by creating humanly relatable texts in which nature is made accessible. While it will always fall short of the actual experience of nature, the ability to preserve moments in time through writing about them or painting them is something that only human beings do in order to remember and make sense of the world. Aldo Leopold wrote about his experiences without the hubris of believing that he fully captured nature in his work, but with the knowledge that he was finding definitions about nature that the reader would use to find empathy. He opened up the experience to human interpretation while being clear that what he accomplished fell short. This does not mean that the work was not great, but that there was a larger greatness that could never fully be defined through the mere task of writing about it. In writing reflections it is always frustrating how small the description of something is in comparison to its reality. The human need to capture things and create definitions means that there is always a frustration about the inadequacy of the human language. Leopold manages to place the natural world into context for human readers without compromising it by claiming to be able to truly describe it. Through developing ways in which to define nature on human terms, he creates a response because the reader understands those terms. What might be said about his work is that the strongest argument that he makes is in separating human beings from nature. As human beings try to understand how they are a part of the natural world, Leopold makes it clear that they are not. Human beings are mere aliens in the natural world. Works Cited Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac New York: Oxford University Press, 1949. Print. Read More