your town reads leopold

On this SlideShare page, you will find several Power Point presentations, one for each of the most popular essays to read aloud from A Sand County Almanac at Aldo Leopold Weekend events. Each presentation has the essay text right on the slides, paired with beautiful images that help add a visual element to public readings. Dave Winefske (Aldo Leopold Weekend event planner from Argyle, Wisconsin) gets credit for putting these together. Thanks Dave!

A note on images within the presentations: we have only received permission to use these images within these presentations, as part of this event. You will see a photo credit slide as the last image in every presentation. Please be sure to show that slide to your audience at least once, and if you don't mind leaving it up to show at the end of each essay, that is best. Also please note that we do not have permission to use these images outside of Aldo Leopold Weekend reading event presentations. For example, the images that come from the Aldo Leopold Foundation archive are not “public domain,” yet we see unauthorized uses of them all the time on the internet. So, hopefully that’s enough said on this topic—if you have any questions, just let us know. mail@aldoleopold.org

If you download these presentations to use in your event, feel free to delete this intro slide before showing to your audience.

There are some who can live without wild things, and somewho cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.

JANUARY:January Thaw

FEBRUARY:Good Oak

“Rest!” cries the chief sawyer,and we pause for breath.

MARCH:The Geese Return

One swallow does not makea summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.

What a dull world if we knew all about geese!

APRIL:Draba

Thesmallest flowerthat blows

Bur Oak

Photo by Virginia Kline

Bur oak is the only tree that can stand up to a prairie fire and live … its cork is armor.

He who owns a veteran bur oak owns more than a tree. He owns a historical library, and a reserved seat in the theater of evolution.

Sky Dance

I must be sure that, come April, there be no dearth of dancers in the sunset sky.

MAY:Back from the Argentine

Whoever invented the word ‘grace’ must have seenthe wing-folding of the plover.

JUNE:The Alder Fork

JULY:Great Possessions

… it is a fact, patent both to my dog and myself, that at daybreak I am the sole owner of all the acres I can walk over.

Prairie Birthday

… I watch eagerly a certain country graveyard that I pass in driving to and from my farm.

It is an ordinary graveyard, bordered by the usual spruces, and studded with the usual pink granite or white marble headstones …

What a thousand acres of Silphium looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not to be asked.

AUGUST:The Green Pasture

I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all …

… except by some wandering deer.

SEPTEMBER:The Choral Copse

OCTOBER:Smoky Gold

Too Early

Getting up too early is a vice habitual in horned owls, stars, geese, and freight trains.

To arrive too early in the marsh is an adventure in pure listening; the ear roams at will among the noises of the night, without let or hindrance from hand or eye.

Red Lanterns

… I think that blackberries must first have learned how to glowin the sand counties of central Wisconsin.

NOVEMBER: If I Were the Wind

A tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detainingthe wind.

Axe-in-Hand

A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of the land. Signatures of course differ, whether written with axe or pen, and this is as it should be.

A Mighty Fortress

Every farm woodland, in addition to yielding lumber, fuel, and posts, should provide its owner a liberal education. This crop of wisdom never fails, but it is not always harvested.

DECEMBER: Home Range

PinesAbove The Snow

6-5-2-9-0

To band a bird is to hold a ticket in a great lottery.

65290 has long since gone to his reward. I hope that in his new woods, great oaks full of ants’ eggs keep falling all day long … and I hope that he still wears my band.

MARSHLAND ELEGY

The quality of cranes, I think, lies in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words.

And so they live and have their being – these cranes – not in the constricted present, but in the wider reaches of evolutionary time.

Like a white ghost of a glacier, the mists advance … sliding across bogmeadows heavy with dew. A single silence hangs from horizonto horizon.

THE SAND COUNTIES

Perhaps the farmers who did not want to move out of the Sand Counties had some deep reason, rooted far back in history, for preferring to stay.

ON A MONUMENT TOTHE PIGEON

For one species to mourn another is a new thing under the sun.

Yet there remains the river, in a few spots hardly changed since Paul Bunyan’s day; at early dawn, before the motor boats awaken, one can still hear it singing in the wilderness.

FLAMBEAU

I am sitting in a 60-mile-an-hour bus sailing over a highway originally laid out for horse and buggy … in the narrow thread of sod between the shaved banks and the toppling fences grow the relics of what once was Illinois: the prairie.

ILLINOIS BUS RIDE

THINKING LIKE A MOUNTAIN

I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.

SONG OF THE GAVILAN

This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it you must live here a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers.

CHEAT TAKES OVER

CLANDEBOYE

Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another. One thing most of us have gone blind to is the quality of marshes.

To promote perception is the only truly creative part of recreational engineering.

CONSERVATION ESTHETIC

Public policies for outdoor recreation are controversial … thus the Wilderness Society seeks to exclude roads from the hinterlands, and the Chamber of Commerce to extend them, both in the name of recreation.

Let us now consider another component of recreation, which is more subtle and complex: the feeling of isolation in nature.

Photo Credits• Historic photographs: Aldo Leopold Foundation archives

• A Sand County Almanac photographs by Michael Sewell

• David Wisnefske, Sugar River Valley Pheasants Forever, Wisconsin Environmental Education Board, Wisconsin Environmental Education Foundation, Argyle Land Ethic Academy (ALEA)

• UW Stevens Point Freckmann Herbarium, R. Freckmann, V.Kline, E. Judziewicz, K. Kohout, D. Lee, K Sytma, R. Kowal, P. Drobot, D. Woodland, A. Meeks, R. Bierman

• Curt Meine, (Aldo Leopold Biographer)

• Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Environmental Education for Kids (EEK)

• Hays Cummins, Miami of Ohio University

• Leopold Education Project, Ed Pembleton

• Bird Pictures by Bill Schmoker

• Pheasants Forever, Roger Hill

• Ruffed Grouse Society

• US Fish and Wildlife Service and US Forest Service

• Eric Engbretson

• James Kurz

• Owen Gromme Collection

• John White & Douglas Cooper

• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

• Ohio State University Extension, Buckeye Yard and Garden Online

• New Jersey University, John Muir Society, Artchive.com, and Labor Law Talk