A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation

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.