Aldo Leopold's Shack and the Land Ethic
Near Baraboo, Wisconsin
Northeast of Baraboo, on the sandy bank of the Wisconsin River, sits a weathered chicken coop that changed how the world thinks about nature. In nineteen thirty-five, the conservationist Aldo Leopold bought a worn-out, abandoned farm in these sand counties, land ruined by careless plowing and fire. His family fixed up the old coop as a retreat and simply called it the Shack.
Weekend after weekend they planted pine seedlings, watched the geese pass over, and nursed the tired soil back toward health. Out of those seasons Leopold wrote a series of luminous essays, gathered after his death into the book A Sand County Almanac. In it he argued for what he called a land ethic, the radical idea that soil, water, plants, and animals form one community to which people belong, not one they merely own.
Leopold died in nineteen forty-eight of a heart attack while helping fight a grass fire on a neighbor's property, before his book ever appeared. Published the following year, A Sand County Almanac has since sold more than two million copies and been translated into some fifteen languages. The Shack and its farm are now a National Historic Landmark, cared for by the Aldo Leopold Foundation.
