A Passion For Nature As Great As Thoreau's

In July, 1909, a 22-year-old U.S. Forest Service recruit stepped off a train in the Arizona Territory bound for his first assignment. A cocksure graduate of what was then called the Yale Forest School, he soon found himself leading a team of veteran lumbermen through the mountains on a reconnaissance mission. Eager and a little foolhardy, he made surveying mistakes and ignored the lumbermen's advice. He even insisted that they cook without a stove and eat on the ground--because that was more natural. When the work was done, and the lumbermen wandered off to grumble about the new kid, Aldo Leopold took time to write.

Leopold, who died in 1949, wrote all his life, leaving a record of the transformation of an unfledged young forester into a passionate conservationist. His crowning work is A Sand County Almanac, published 50 years ago, after his death. It is one of the most influential and important pieces of nature writing since Thoreau's Walden--and one of the few to approach Thoreau in originality and literary value. Environmentalists consider it a bible: It played a major role in shaping the American environmental movement in the 1960s. And it is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the movement's intellectual foundation.