A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There is a 1949 non-fiction book by American ecologist, forester, and environmentalist Aldo Leopold. Describing the land around the author's home in Sauk County, Wisconsin, the collection of essays advocate Leopold's idea of a "land ethic", or a responsible relationship existing between people and the land they inhabit. Edited and published by his son, Luna, a year after Leopold's death, the book is considered a landmark in the American conservation movement. The book has had over two million copies printed and has been translated into at least fourteen languages. It has informed and changed the environmental movement and stimulated a widespread interest in ecology as a science.
There is a sense of grief pervading the book. A beautiful thing has been lost, is being lost, will be lost, unless we change. We seem no closer to achieving this goal today than we were when this book was first published in 1948, scant years before the author died fighting a prarie fire.
