A Sand County Almanac

A Sand County Almanac was published in 1949 amid a rising tide of prosperity and innovation in the United States but also an increase in damaging environmental practices. The book represents a distillation of these tensions insofar as it contrasts a higher standard of living with increasing alienation from the land. The book was also published in the decades after the Great Depression, which had implications for Leopold’s interpretation of economic value and description of human management of the land.

Over the course of the 20th century, human ingenuity ushered in a new wave of technological achievements, many of which represented a break from the natural world. In Part 2, Leopold mentions one of these—“Mr. Du Pont’s nylons”—which were nylon stockings created by the chemical company DuPont (117). These synthetic woman’s stockings were first introduced to the public in 1938 and released to mass market two years later, in 1940. Unlike silk stockings, which required natural fibers (and silkworms), nylon stockings were created entirely in a lab, ushering in a new age of synthetic textiles and thus increasing the divide between humans and the land.

In the same passage as his mention of nylon, Leopold cites Vannevar Bush’s bombs as one of the technological advances of the 20th century. Bush was an influential mathematician, engineer, and scientist who led a laboratory during World War II in which researchers investigated everything from better explosives to more effective radar technology. Bush was also involved in efforts to build the atomic bomb. These projects changed the course of the war and had a lasting impact on the public’s appreciation of the role of science. Even more fundamentally, both these bombs and the invention of synthetic fabrics changed humanity’s relationship to nature; no longer were humans directly tied to the natural world; instead, they could see themselves as having conquered it, even to the point (as with the atomic bomb) of its total destruction. Significantly, Leopold writes that these developments are not the true sign of humans being more highly evolved than other animals; for that sign, he looks to the human capacity to mourn the death of other species.

The Great Depression is another essential element of the historical context of the book; Leopold’s own farm, which he describes in Part 1, was purchased by his family in 1935 from a previous owner who had struggled through the Great Depression. That owner “hated this farm, skinned it of residual fertility, burned its farmhouse, threw it back into the lap of the County” (10). The economic and environmental catastrophe that created the Great Depression had consequences for people, and for the land, as people, under increasing economic pressure, squeezed the last drops from their farms and then abandoned them; this cycle represents the constraints of an approach to land dominated by economic value. The New Deal, which was designed to help the United States recover from the Great Depression, also figures in the book, as the New Deal included several conservation programs. While these were an important step forward in some ways, they were limited in others; as Leopold describes, even well-intentioned conservation efforts were framed in terms of human value, rather than respect for nature, and therefore contained harmful practices such as the building of roads through the wilderness.