|
|
Hit 7 - A Sand County Almanac (Outdoor Essays & Reflections)
|
List Price: $45.00
Our Price: $33.71
Your Save: $ 11.29 ( 25% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
|
Average Customer Rating:  
|
|
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 508.73
EAN: 9780195146172
Format: Illustrated
ISBN: 0195146174
Label: Oxford University Press, USA
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 194
Publication Date: 2001-11-15
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Studio: Oxford University Press, USA
|
|
|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
|
Aldo Leopold's "A Sand County Almanac" has enthralled generations of nature lovers and conservationists and is indeed revered by everyone seriously interested in protecting the natural world. Hailed for prose that is "full of beauty and vigor and bite" (The New York Times), it is perhaps the finest example of nature writing since Thoreau's Walden. Now this classic work is available in a completely redesigned and lavishly illustrated gift edition, featuring over one hundred beautiful full-color pictures by Michael Sewell, one of the country's leading nature photographers. Sewell, whose work has graced the pages of Audubon and Sierra magazines, walked Leopold's property in Wisconsin and shot these photographs specifically for this edition, allowing readers to see Sand County as Leopold saw it. 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." With this gift edition of A Sand County Almanac, a new generation of readers can walk beside one of America's most respected naturalists as he conveys the beauty of a marsh before sunrise or the wealth of history to be found in an ancient oak.
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: The anchor volume of an American conservation bookshelf
Comment: The definitive anchor volume on the bookshelf of modern American conservation. Leopold presents the big picture, painted as many small scenes. Again and again, I return to the February essay, "Good Oak," a classic of natural history writing. Leopold is a natural historian of the old school.
If recycling or climate change or energy has brought you into the conservation movement, this is the first book to read to get grounded in conservation from the ecological perspective. For those coming in from the animal rights movement, here is a book to help make sense of the consumptive side of conservation. For everyone else - here are nature writings from a man well-rounded in both his consumptive use and his appreciation of the landscape that may help explain where we conservationists are coming from.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A book for every season
Comment: Aldo Leopold's book of essays is a good one to pull out every month and remark on the change of seasons, the month gone by and the one to come. It will plant you as firmly on the sandy plains of Adams County, Wisconsin, watching the bright red blackberry bushes in the morning sun, as any text you will ever see.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Frankly, I was disappointed
Comment: I expected a book that would move me emotionally as well as intellectually, like Abby's Desert Solitude. That's not what this book is all about. It is well written, yes, but it only shoots for the intellect, not the heart, or at least it did for me. It is still an important read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Classic
Comment: A classic. As we rush into brave new environmental worlds where angels fear to tread, and as our kids grow up plugged in rather than playing in the dirt, this should be required reading in all schools (and required for the parents, too). Besides presenting a compelling and important argument, it's also a very good book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Leaving a light footprint on the good earth
Comment: I re-read Leopold's Sand County Almanac every couple of years or so. It's not just a beautifully poetic celebration of the land. Its defense of a new sense of moral responsibility to the environment, spelled out in the book's "The Land Ethic," is a bracing tonic against the modern temptation to take the biosphere for granted. In these days of global warming, fossil fuel depletion, and escalating degradation of the land, water, and atmosphere, Leopold's 60-year-old plea for a new environmental ethic is both prophetic and urgently immediate.
In "The Land Ethic," Leopold argues for a new understanding of the moral community. Earlier ethical models focused on interpersonal and social relationships between humans. But given the interconnectedness of all members of the biosphere, we need to extend the moral community to include earth, sky, water, and all species--the biota. At least since the dawn of the modern age, human have tended to prize the biota only in terms of what we could get out of it. It had a purely economic, utilitarian value. But this way of thinking has resulted in environmental (not to mention economic and political) crisis.
What we must do now, argues Leopold, is to recognize our "vital" relationship to the biota, acknowledging that the well-being of our species is intimately connected to the well-being of the whole. This calls for a new standard of valuation that runs counter to the older, economic model. "Quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem," writes Leopold. "Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient." And if we do that, he concludes, we'll adopt the following ethical principle: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise" (p. 262). And part of what this means is that humans should strive to leave relatively light footprints on the earth, because the lighter our impact, the more likely the biota can successfully readjust to maintain integrity, stability, and beauty.
Good, important advice.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
