Wise and lyrical meditations on environmental ethics, human and natural history, and the passage of time. Some measure of how fiercely good it is: a well-read, retired U.S. Army colonel once told me that he considered Leopold to be better than Shakespeare (Helen Macdonald)These beautiful essays, based on the restoration of an exhausted 80-acre farm in the sand country of central Wisconsin, are full of insights rooted in intelligent humility that inform naturalists to this day (Isabella Tree)A classic ... there are moments of soft beauty [and] his epigrams are whipcrack smart (Robert Macfarlane Wall Street Journal)A trenchant book, full of vigor and bite (The New York Times)One of the seminal works of the environmental movement (Boston Globe)

'One of the most influential books about the natural world ever published' Paul Kingsnorth, Guardian'There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot,' begins Aldo Leopold's totemic work of ecological thought. Ranging from lyrical observations of the changing seasons over a year on his Wisconsin farm to his hugely influential idea of a 'land ethic' signifying moral equilibrium between humans and all other life on earth, A Sand County Almanac changed perceptions of the natural world and helped give birth to the modern conservation movement.

'An unequivocal statement of conscience that will carry down the generations ... his argument seems more urgently true now than ever' The New York Times

Considered by many to be the father of wildlife ecology, Aldo Leopold (1887 - 1948) was a conservationist, forester, philosopher, educator, writer, and outdoor enthusiast. Among his best-known ideas is the "land ethic," set out in A Sand County Almanac (1949), which calls for humankind's 'ethical community' to expand and include 'soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land,' and 'changes the role of Homo sapiens from conquerer of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it'.