“Man always kills the thing he loves…” #1949club

After a mixed bag of reading for my first day of the #1949Club, I thought I would turn to a book that’s been on Mount TBR for a number of years – since 2020, in fact, when I picked it up through Hive, no doubt stockpiling books during the pandemic. I don’t know where I heard about this one, but it’s apparently considered a pioneering classic of ecology writing, so should have been right up my street. The book is “A Sand County Almanac” by Aldo Leopold, and it was an interesting read, though not without its issues… Leopold’s Wikipedia entry describes him as “an American writer, philosopher, naturalist, scientist, ecologist, forester, professor, conservationist, and environmentalist. He taught at the University of Wisconsin”. So that’s an impressive sounding resume, and it seems he was a pioneer of ecology, expressing environmental concerns early on before this kind of thinking began to spread. The “sand county” of the book’s title is in Wisconsin, and much of the writing it contains is…