A Sand County Almanac: Part II: Chihuahua and Sonora Summary & Analysis

Leopold believes that natural beauty is unquantifiable. He gives an example of a landscape that is made beautiful by the addition of a ruffled grouse. However, he notes that a grouse is a tiny percentage of the “mass or the energy of an acre.” Still, it has some special power that brings beauty to the woods where it resides.

After listing other birds that greatly enhance their environments, Leopold observes, “ornithological texts do not record these facts.” Nonetheless, he finds them important, and tells the story of seeing a rare and shy Thick-billed Parrot in the Sierra Madre.

Leopold offers some advice: he argues that a person should never return to a wilderness they loved when they were young. The golden lily will become “gilded,” and returning “tarnishes a memory.” This is the reason Leopold never returned to the Delta of the Colorado, which he canoed in 1922. When he traveled it as a young man, the water was clean and clear, and plants and animals were thriving. Now, he suspects the Delta has been converted into pasture for cows. He laments that a “freedom from fear has arrived, but a glory has departed from the green lagoons.”

The Delta was almost embarrassingly fertile, hunting was easy because there were so many birds in each flock, and the deer themselves were fat. However, there wasn’t a lot of water, and most of it was salty. The wilderness was so wild it did not yet have place names. Leopold recalls seeing flocks of cranes, and while he suspected they were Sandhill cranes, the name didn’t matter. What mattered was that they were wild, and he was sharing the wilderness with them. He has heard the lagoons are now used to raise cantaloupes. He proclaims, “man always kills the thing he loves,” and has killed much of the wilderness.

Reflecting on the Rio Gavilan, a river in the Sierra Madre mountain range, Leopold recalls the “pulsing harmony” of the wilderness. Most rivers have been, in Leopold’s mind, misused. Even when wilderness areas are converted into parks, the music often becomes pure noise.

Leopold wonders if it is possible for humans and nature to live in harmony. In the Gavilan region, indigenous people lived in and with the wilderness for many years. He can see the ruins of their buildings, and understands that they, like he, saw the land not as “hard and stony,” but a “land of milk and honey.” Historically, the indigenous people in the region would kill a buck on a strict schedule and only during certain months: no earlier than November, no later than January. The land kept its own time. The oak trees, for example, fed a food chain of animals, beginning with the shedding of their acorns every fall.

Leopold criticizes academia for having experts and professors focus their studies so narrowly. He compares this to listening only to a single instrument in the symphony of nature. He argues that looking at the whole symphony, or nature as a whole, is “the domain of poets.” He continues, “professors serve science and science serves progress.”

Science contributes to the world both materially and morally, but Leopold argues its most important (if most dangerous) contribution is the scientific point of view, the use of facts. For example, he worries that ideas about the music of a river have no place in science, such that a scientist would argue in favor of making a river more accessible to the public, as opposed to preserving its wildness.