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There is no individual more closely associated with the articulation of the wilderness idea in modern America than Aldo Leopold. And with good reason: his luminous collection, Sand County Almanac And Sketches Here and There (1949), contains essential insights into the complex relationship between humans and nature. "Thinking like a Mountain," for example, offers a retrospective analysis of an episode in which, "full of trigger itch," Leopold gunned down a female wolf in the Arizona high country; it then details the impact of this event on his evolving conservation consciousness (Leopold 1949). That essay set up his more elaborate formulation of the significance of the wild in human affairs, most powerfully in "The Land Ethic" (Leopold 1949). Yet for all the clarity of its prose, Sand County did not become a bestseller until the 1960s when its author was "rediscovered" amidst the rise of 1960s environmentalism. But at least some of Leopold's contemporaries fully appreciated his stirring literary achievement. As the New York Times ... it, Sand County Almanac is a "trenchant book, full of beauty and vigor and bite," qualities that the Boston Globe also praised, arguing that his narrative style penetrates "directly to the heart of the subject and to the heart of the...





