I was fourteen when I first read A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. That his 1949 book was hailed as “landmark” or, in Wallace Stegner’s words, “a famous, almost holy book in conservation circles” I knew nothing about. What appealed to my fourteen-year-old sensibilities were the intimate images of land and seasons in place and the seeming openness of this man’s struggle to frame a personal truth. In the last essay, “The Land Ethic,” Leopold enlarged the community’s boundaries “to include soil, water, plants, animals, or collectively: the land,” and his call for an extension of ethics to land relations expressed a sense of responsibility and reciprocity not yet embraced by this nation but embedded in many indigenous traditions of experience.

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