What do you think?
Rate this book
The River of the Mother of God: and Other Essays
His name is inextricably linked with a single work, A Sand County Almanac, a classic of natural history literature and the conservationist's bible. This book brings together the best of Leopold's essays.
400 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
13 people are currently reading
856 people want to read
About the author
Aldo Leopold
59 books1,044 followers
A Sand County Almanac
, published posthumously in 1949, of American writer and naturalist Aldo Leopold celebrates the beauty of the world and advocates the conscious protection of wild places.
His effect on resource management and policy lasted in the early to mid-twentieth century, and since his death, his influence continued to expand. Through his observation, experience, and reflection at his river farm in Wisconsin, he honed the concepts of land health and a land ethic that since his death ever influenced in the years. Despite more than five hundred articles and three books during the course of his geographically widespread career, time at his shack and farm in Wisconsin inspired most of the disarmingly simple essays that so many persons found so thought-provoking.
Life story of Aldo Leopold, the development of his career as a conservationist, scientist, and philosopher, and his open-mindedness, his vision, and the evolution of his thinking throughout his life inspire other persons to start or to further their own intellectual journey of discovery. A closer engagement with his story, his inspiration, and his family helps persons better to understand the contours of environmental history and the role in culture and to reflect on their own in the complex weave of the way in which our society relates to land. His vision of a society that cares about the connections between people and land provides a starting point for thinking about modern-day cultures, economies, ecosystems, and communities.
Starker Leopold, Luna Leopold, Nina Leopold, Carl Leopold, and Estella Leopold—children of Aldo—founded the Aldo Leopold foundation in 1982. People respected all members of the Leopold family as scientists and conservationists in their own right. They recognized the shack and farm as a focal point for legacy of their father for generations to come and for this primary reason established the foundation. This public charity owns and manages the Leopold center, including the Leopold shack and 264 surrounding acres in addition to several other parcels and also manages much of the adjoining 1,800-acre Leopold memorial reserve, which neighboring landowners established as an early trust in 1967. It acts as the executor of literary estate of Leopold, encourages scholarship on Leopold, and serves as a clearinghouse for information regarding Leopold, his work, and his ideas. It provides interpretive resources and tours for five thousand visitors annually, cooperates with partners on education and other programming off site, and maintains a robust website and numerous print resources. The Aldo Leopold foundation manages this Goodreads page.
His effect on resource management and policy lasted in the early to mid-twentieth century, and since his death, his influence continued to expand. Through his observation, experience, and reflection at his river farm in Wisconsin, he honed the concepts of land health and a land ethic that since his death ever influenced in the years. Despite more than five hundred articles and three books during the course of his geographically widespread career, time at his shack and farm in Wisconsin inspired most of the disarmingly simple essays that so many persons found so thought-provoking.
Life story of Aldo Leopold, the development of his career as a conservationist, scientist, and philosopher, and his open-mindedness, his vision, and the evolution of his thinking throughout his life inspire other persons to start or to further their own intellectual journey of discovery. A closer engagement with his story, his inspiration, and his family helps persons better to understand the contours of environmental history and the role in culture and to reflect on their own in the complex weave of the way in which our society relates to land. His vision of a society that cares about the connections between people and land provides a starting point for thinking about modern-day cultures, economies, ecosystems, and communities.
Starker Leopold, Luna Leopold, Nina Leopold, Carl Leopold, and Estella Leopold—children of Aldo—founded the Aldo Leopold foundation in 1982. People respected all members of the Leopold family as scientists and conservationists in their own right. They recognized the shack and farm as a focal point for legacy of their father for generations to come and for this primary reason established the foundation. This public charity owns and manages the Leopold center, including the Leopold shack and 264 surrounding acres in addition to several other parcels and also manages much of the adjoining 1,800-acre Leopold memorial reserve, which neighboring landowners established as an early trust in 1967. It acts as the executor of literary estate of Leopold, encourages scholarship on Leopold, and serves as a clearinghouse for information regarding Leopold, his work, and his ideas. It provides interpretive resources and tours for five thousand visitors annually, cooperates with partners on education and other programming off site, and maintains a robust website and numerous print resources. The Aldo Leopold foundation manages this Goodreads page.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 13, 2017
These essays (written between 1904-1947) show how Leopold's concept of soil conservation, game management, forestry, wildlife conservation, and land health changed over the years. I enjoyed that the essays show the growth of his concept of an ecological conscience; taking personal responsibility to understand the complex ecosystems we live in, and striving to "preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community".
Ecological education and personal integrity should guide farmers, industries, and the common citizen to use the land and natural resources in a way that is minimally destructive. We should focus on preserving overall health and stability of natural resources for future enjoyment and advocate for preservation of wildlife and true wilderness areas. Leopold also implores conservationists to work together to prioritize the intertwined health of soil, flora, and fauna, rather than focusing on one area or species.
Leopold's warnings against viewing the land as an object from which to gain profit are still relevant in the 21st century. It is easier to conserve than to to attempt rebuilding an ecosystem that we have destroyed.
Ecological education and personal integrity should guide farmers, industries, and the common citizen to use the land and natural resources in a way that is minimally destructive. We should focus on preserving overall health and stability of natural resources for future enjoyment and advocate for preservation of wildlife and true wilderness areas. Leopold also implores conservationists to work together to prioritize the intertwined health of soil, flora, and fauna, rather than focusing on one area or species.
Leopold's warnings against viewing the land as an object from which to gain profit are still relevant in the 21st century. It is easier to conserve than to to attempt rebuilding an ecosystem that we have destroyed.
October 7, 2017
Starts off slow, but the later essays are incredible.
May 27, 2024
I had never heard of Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) until I noticed in a Wikipedia entry about Wendell Berry that Leopold, along with Henry David Thoreau, was one of Berry’s influences. Anyone who knows me knows my abiding admiration for the work and thinking of Wendell Berry. I immediately sought a copy of Leopold’s THE RIVER OF THE MOTHER OF GOD, and now I have one more thing for which to be grateful to Berry.
Leopold was one of the earliest figures in what has since become known as the environmentalist movement. The essays collected in this book span nearly half a century during which Leopold held key positions in forestry and conservation.
Leopold’s attentiveness and reverence are already clear in the earliest essay in the collection, “A Tramp in November,” written in 1904 when he was 17 years old. The essay records a day’s walk: “On the way back I soon fell into that pace which only a cold evening can inspire. Yet there was time to look back from time to time at the magnificent and ever changing sunset. At first only great lights of amber, yellow, and liquid green, it gradually changed to masses of purple and rose against a background of the most delicate lilac. Them, as if inspired with new vigor, the whole heavens became flushed with bars and undulations of fiery red, shading overhead into blurred crimson and then maroon and dusky purple. And when the first stars began to twinkle, it had again receded to a warm glow of embers between black clouds, gradually fading and sinking away.”
The editors have included a copy of a page from the original manuscript for this essay, written in a perfect Palmer cursive that reflects a young man determined to do things right. You would swear that the page on which Leopold was writing had to be ruled, his lines are so even.
By 1918, Leopold had found his calling. His “The Popular Wilderness Fallacy: An Idea That Is Fast Exploding” begins with this: “When the pioneer hewed a path for progress through the American wilderness, there was bred into the American people the idea that civilization and forests were two mutually exclusive propositions. Development and forest destruction went hand in hand; we therefore adopted the fallacy that they were synonymous. A stump was our symbol of progress.”
Leopold’s tone there made me recall Wendell Berry’s essay, “The Loss of the Future,” in which he has this to say: “Power has darkened us. The greater it grows, the harder it is to see beyond it, or to see the alternatives to it. It exercises as compelling an influence on us, who possess and use it, as it does on those we use it upon or against. In spite of all the official talk about our high motives in Vietnam, most of us suspect that the only dependable explanation of our presence there is that we are strong enough to be there; for some, that seems to be a justification. The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.”
Somebody should issue Leopold’s 1919 “Notes on the Behavior of Pintail Ducks in a Hailstorm” as a broadside. Here it is in its admirable entirety:
“On October 20, 1918, I was hunting ducks on the Rio Grande south of Los Lunas, New Mexico. I was sitting on my blind on a sandbar, with some dead ducks set out as decoys, when a very severe hailstorm set in. During the thick of the storm I discovered that a flock of about forty Pintail Ducks (Dafila acuta) had settled among my decoys not twenty yards distant. Each bird was facing toward the storm, and each had his head and bill pointed almost vertically into the air. The flock presented a very strange appearance, and I was puzzled for a moment as to the meaning of the unusual posture. Then it dawned on me what they were doing. In a normal position the hailstones would have hurt their sensitive bills, but pointed up vertically the bill presented a negligible surface from which hailstones would naturally be deflected. The correctness of this explanation was later proven by the fact that a normal position was resumed as soon as the hail changed into a slow rain.
“Has any other observer noted a similar performance in this or other species of ducks, or in any other birds?”
By 1923, Leopold is in full swing. His “A Criticism of the Booster Spirit” pulls out all the stops and levels criticism at offenders including Chambers of Commerce: “The booster seems almost proud of the ugliness and destruction that accompany industrialism. That some of this is inevitable and necessary I am the first to admit. That it can not be mitigated I emphatically deny. Is there any real economic necessity for the army of billboards that marches across the peaceful landscapes of the Rio Grande Valley, flaunting its ribald banners in the face of the eternal hills, and shouting at every turn of the road what is the best brand of chewing gum, tires, or tobacco? And to top
off this indignity, there is even a billboard erected by a Business Woman’s Club, proclaiming the virtues of our city. ‘Et tu, Brute?’”
Leopold’s passion for the preservation of wilderness (“unknown places”) reaches its peak in “The River of the Mother of God,” his 1924 essay whose title the editors chose as the title for the book. He refers to the South American river’s name as “resonant of the clank of silver armor and the cruel progress of the Cross” and asserts that the wilderness is “something that has helped build the race for such innumerable centuries that we may logically suppose that it will help preserve it in the centuries to come.”
That essay concludes: “Falling that, it seems to me we fail in the ultimate test of our vaunted superiority— the self-control of environment. We fall back into the biological category of the potato bug, which exterminated the potato, and thereby exterminated itself.”
In the final essay in the book, “The Ecological Consciece,” (1947), Leopold confidently and resonantly writes: “The direction is clear, and the first step is to throw your weight around on matters of right and wrong in land use. Cease to be intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.”
An argument can be made that we live in a country that does not have, or apparently care about, a desirable future. We can take some comfort that we have had among us thoughtful, articulate, and committed souls such as Aldo Leopold and Wendell Berry. Thanks to editors Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Calllicott and the University of Wisconsin Press for making Leopold’s work available.
Leopold was one of the earliest figures in what has since become known as the environmentalist movement. The essays collected in this book span nearly half a century during which Leopold held key positions in forestry and conservation.
Leopold’s attentiveness and reverence are already clear in the earliest essay in the collection, “A Tramp in November,” written in 1904 when he was 17 years old. The essay records a day’s walk: “On the way back I soon fell into that pace which only a cold evening can inspire. Yet there was time to look back from time to time at the magnificent and ever changing sunset. At first only great lights of amber, yellow, and liquid green, it gradually changed to masses of purple and rose against a background of the most delicate lilac. Them, as if inspired with new vigor, the whole heavens became flushed with bars and undulations of fiery red, shading overhead into blurred crimson and then maroon and dusky purple. And when the first stars began to twinkle, it had again receded to a warm glow of embers between black clouds, gradually fading and sinking away.”
The editors have included a copy of a page from the original manuscript for this essay, written in a perfect Palmer cursive that reflects a young man determined to do things right. You would swear that the page on which Leopold was writing had to be ruled, his lines are so even.
By 1918, Leopold had found his calling. His “The Popular Wilderness Fallacy: An Idea That Is Fast Exploding” begins with this: “When the pioneer hewed a path for progress through the American wilderness, there was bred into the American people the idea that civilization and forests were two mutually exclusive propositions. Development and forest destruction went hand in hand; we therefore adopted the fallacy that they were synonymous. A stump was our symbol of progress.”
Leopold’s tone there made me recall Wendell Berry’s essay, “The Loss of the Future,” in which he has this to say: “Power has darkened us. The greater it grows, the harder it is to see beyond it, or to see the alternatives to it. It exercises as compelling an influence on us, who possess and use it, as it does on those we use it upon or against. In spite of all the official talk about our high motives in Vietnam, most of us suspect that the only dependable explanation of our presence there is that we are strong enough to be there; for some, that seems to be a justification. The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.”
Somebody should issue Leopold’s 1919 “Notes on the Behavior of Pintail Ducks in a Hailstorm” as a broadside. Here it is in its admirable entirety:
“On October 20, 1918, I was hunting ducks on the Rio Grande south of Los Lunas, New Mexico. I was sitting on my blind on a sandbar, with some dead ducks set out as decoys, when a very severe hailstorm set in. During the thick of the storm I discovered that a flock of about forty Pintail Ducks (Dafila acuta) had settled among my decoys not twenty yards distant. Each bird was facing toward the storm, and each had his head and bill pointed almost vertically into the air. The flock presented a very strange appearance, and I was puzzled for a moment as to the meaning of the unusual posture. Then it dawned on me what they were doing. In a normal position the hailstones would have hurt their sensitive bills, but pointed up vertically the bill presented a negligible surface from which hailstones would naturally be deflected. The correctness of this explanation was later proven by the fact that a normal position was resumed as soon as the hail changed into a slow rain.
“Has any other observer noted a similar performance in this or other species of ducks, or in any other birds?”
By 1923, Leopold is in full swing. His “A Criticism of the Booster Spirit” pulls out all the stops and levels criticism at offenders including Chambers of Commerce: “The booster seems almost proud of the ugliness and destruction that accompany industrialism. That some of this is inevitable and necessary I am the first to admit. That it can not be mitigated I emphatically deny. Is there any real economic necessity for the army of billboards that marches across the peaceful landscapes of the Rio Grande Valley, flaunting its ribald banners in the face of the eternal hills, and shouting at every turn of the road what is the best brand of chewing gum, tires, or tobacco? And to top
off this indignity, there is even a billboard erected by a Business Woman’s Club, proclaiming the virtues of our city. ‘Et tu, Brute?’”
Leopold’s passion for the preservation of wilderness (“unknown places”) reaches its peak in “The River of the Mother of God,” his 1924 essay whose title the editors chose as the title for the book. He refers to the South American river’s name as “resonant of the clank of silver armor and the cruel progress of the Cross” and asserts that the wilderness is “something that has helped build the race for such innumerable centuries that we may logically suppose that it will help preserve it in the centuries to come.”
That essay concludes: “Falling that, it seems to me we fail in the ultimate test of our vaunted superiority— the self-control of environment. We fall back into the biological category of the potato bug, which exterminated the potato, and thereby exterminated itself.”
In the final essay in the book, “The Ecological Consciece,” (1947), Leopold confidently and resonantly writes: “The direction is clear, and the first step is to throw your weight around on matters of right and wrong in land use. Cease to be intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.”
An argument can be made that we live in a country that does not have, or apparently care about, a desirable future. We can take some comfort that we have had among us thoughtful, articulate, and committed souls such as Aldo Leopold and Wendell Berry. Thanks to editors Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Calllicott and the University of Wisconsin Press for making Leopold’s work available.
April 15, 2024
While the writing is top notch, some of it is a bit targeted or dated. What really stands out is the relevance of his work that is as valid today as it was 100 years ago. His perception of ecology and his belief in the land ethic left me a bit shocked to see someone with so much wisdom reaching out to the future with the hope and conviction that people could change and live harmoniously with the land.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews