Time and History Theme Analysis

Within A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold often marks the passing of time by noting the hour, day, week, or season. However, although he divides the first, eponymous part of his Almanac into months, the natural occurrences within each block of time prove more important indicators of changing seasons and natural development than dates on a calendar. Dates are only useful as long as they allow for the monitoring of natural occurrences, but his life is lived by the freeze and thaw of the world around him, the migration of the geese, and the flooding of the river. Dates provide a suggestion of when these events may occur, but the earth’s own biological clock requires more focused attention, and rewards the listener more generously than a paper calendar or mechanical watch. Similarly, Leopold often looks to nature for lessons on history, and finds that events of the past are often carefully recorded in the landscape itself, providing supplemental, or even entirely new resources for the observant naturalist. Leopold, leading by example, advises readers to look carefully at the natural world for truly useful markers of time, and for truly comprehensive accounts of history. 

Time can be marked in two different ways. It can be tracked on a calendar created by mankind, or it can be inferred through the weather and the behavior of plants and animals. The book opens with a description of a hibernating skunk waking from his sleep and cutting a path through the January snow. Leopold remarks that this “track marks one of the earliest datable events in that cycle of beginnings and ceasings which we call a year.” Leopold finds importance in the behaviors of the natural world, which provide more information and real-time feedback than a conventional calendar. Similarly, in May, the “final proof of spring” is not the date on the calendar, but instead the “flight-song of the upland plover, just now back from the Argentine.” Leopold watches the plants and animals around him respond to the changing seasons. He notes that each species has its own special way of marking time, and takes different significance from changing seasons and weather. Mice recognize “snow means freedom from want and fear,” while hawks see thaws as “freedom from want and fear.” Although the time-marking of the animals seems self-centered, Leopold argues that humans who are cut off from nature, not forced to chop their own wood or monitor the seasons themselves, are similarly obliviously self-centered.

Just as time can be tracked on paper or on the land itself, history can be recorded both by humans and by the landscape. Leopold describes history as a “hodge-podge,” and is happy to look for clues to the past in unexpected places. He describes how records of the past are contained within a tree he has cut down on his property. When he takes the saw to it, “fragrant little chips of history spewed from the saw cut,” and in the sawdust he sensed “something more than wood…the integrated transect of a century.” He continues, “our saw was bating its way, stroke by stroke, decade by decade, into the chronology of a lifetime, written in concentric annual rings of good oak.” Leopold respects and carefully observes this tree, and as he cuts it he records in his Almanac the events of each year, both in terms of human history (federal laws, Supreme Court decisions), and events in the natural world (floods, fires, droughts). Later in the Almanac, Leopold describes the peats and bogs of his county as containing their own history. They are made of “compressed remains of the mosses that clogged the pools, of the tamaracks that spread over the moss, of the cranes that bugled over the tamaracks since the retreat of the ice sheet. An endless caravan of generations has built of its own bones this bridge into the future, this habitat where the oncoming host again may live and die.” Although he does not suggest taking a cross section of the bog like he did of the oak he felled in the winter months, Leopold acknowledges how time and history are hidden in so many out of the way places. Even the cranes themselves, whose migration path allows them to stop on the bogs, live “not in the constricted present, but in the wider reaches of evolutionary time. Their annual return is the ticking of the geologic clock.” These birds hold history in their bodies, minds, and behavior, instinctively acting out a ritual that stretches into the distant past and (hopefully) into the far future. Similarly, Leopold believes “A sense of history should be the most precious gift of science and of the arts,” but also believes that the grebe “knows more history than we do,” and holds within him a “sense [of] who won the battle of time.”

Leopold doesn’t argue that the reader should do away with man-made markers of time or burn their history books. In fact, the first section of his Almanac, which tracks his observations across seasons, is divided into months to give the reader a clearer sense of the passage of time. Similarly, he enjoys watching birds in the early morning, but only knows when to wake up by consulting a clock and setting an alarm. Instead, he advises readers to become more attuned to the natural rhythms of time, and the ways in which the plants, animals, climate, soil, and rivers record the past, shifting and changing with and against the carefully demarcated human hours, days, and months.