A great way to meet Leopold

A Sand County Almanac: Illustrated Edition
Aldo Leopold; photos by Michael Sewell
Oxford University Press, 2001
192 pp., $35

People who admire Aldo Leopold for his wonderfully descriptive essays and thought-provoking ideas about conservation will be thrilled with a new illustrated edition of A Sand County Almanac.

More importantly, people who've never heard of Aldo Leopold will want to get to know him better after they pick up this 192-page coffee table treasure.

For the first time, Leopold's essays on the seasons at his Wisconsin farm are illustrated by more than 80 full-page color photographs by Michael Sewell. You see an upland plover stretching its wings, the delicate spring blooms of the draba, and the smoky gold of tamaracks in October. There also are sand hill cranes, prairie chickens in mid-dance, and migrating geese.

Leopold's Sand County essays have always appeared with far less colorful artwork. In 1947, Leopold corresponded with Charles Schwartz, an illustrator for the Missouri Conservation Commission, to develop sketches of the plants and animals described in a series of essays he was preparing for publication. Leopold died of a heart attack a year later, but his family continued to work with Schwartz and to find a publisher. The book was released in 1949, a simple collection with black-and-white drawings inserted within the text and, at most, an occasional full-page sketch.

In the 2001 edition, Sewell has captured broad views of the Wisconsin landscape that Leopold loved, as well as great wildlife shots of the animals and plants that live there. This California-based photographer is well qualified to depict Leopold's inspiration and musings. Sewell's work has been published in National Geographic, Audubon, Sierra Club and a variety of leading national wildlife publications and calendars.

All photographs for this two-year project were taken in and around the Leopold Memorial Preserve. In fact, Sewell and naturalist Kenneth Brower (who wrote the introduction) took up residence in "the shack," traipsing the grounds with their own tattered copies of A Sand County Almanac.

The result is a journey very close to Aldo's footsteps. In the "Great Possessions," essay, for example, Leopold wrote about getting up at 3:30 a.m. to listen to the daily "bird-chorus." Sewell chose a pre-dawn image of "the shack" for this essay, taken at exactly 3:30 a.m. The next page follows with a photograph of Leopold's pipe, binoculars and field notes.

The book design by Sewell's wife, Denise, also lends authenticity and intimacy. Leopold's careful signature is used in the Foreword. Endcovers show Leopold's hand-edited and dated manuscripts. The essays themselves have been set in an easy-to-read typeface, and most topics fit easily on a single page.

People familiar with Leopold's works will see that 17 essays from the 1986 edition have been omitted in the latest edition. Absent are all but the Marshland Elegy from Part II (probably because they deal with other parts of the country) and the first three essays in Part III. All 23 essays that outline a year in the life of the Leopold land are included in this edition, plus what have probably become Leopold's most-quoted writings about the need for a land ethic.

To some, A Sand County Almanac: Illustrated Edition may be simply a nice book with beautiful photographs, which isn't a bad introduction to Aldo Leopold. But once people read what Leopold had to say, they'll never look at the land community "and all its fellow members within it" in the same way again. -- Laura Miller

Learn more about Aldo Leopold's ideas and family life at "the shack" in an interview with his oldest daughter, Nina Leopold Bradley. A Sand County Almanac was selected as a Midwestern favorite on Storylines Midwest, a radio project of the American Library Association and Michigan Public Radio. The program aired November 18, but can be downloaded at the following web site: http://michiganradio.org/storylines.asp..

Read about how the newest edition was developed, and preview Michael Sewell's photographs of “the shack” in the Fall 2001 issue of The Leopold Outlook, a newsletter of the Aldo Leopold Foundation. The book also can be ordered from the foundation, which manages the Leopold Memorial Preserve in Wisconsin.