Sand County Almanac

From Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold I decided to present two quotations. The first one is present on page 6 and mentions the following:

"There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace."

I like this piece because I find it humorous. We all know that eggs come from chickens, bacon form pigs, etc... but we don't take these things into consideration when we go to the grocery store. Besides the foods that we eat have so many chemicals and preservatives added that they have become products of science. In my personal experiences, the organic eggs that I have eaten have a different taste to those I have bought at the store. In addition, I like this excerpt because although it is funny it is a statement that one day might become true. People no longer grow their own crops like they used to do before. In the time of my grandparents and great-grandparents, they usually grew everything they ate. All of the trees that my grandfather grew at his backyard produced. In his backyard my grandfather had lemons, guavas, avocados, bananas, peaches, tomatoes, watermelons, figs, grapes, tangerines, oranges, grapefruits, pecans, etc... Now, four years after his death, my uncles have not kept up with his garden and only half of those goods are still producing. Now with our fast lives going a thousand miles per hour we don't have time to be growing our own goods. If we want an apple we go buy it at the store. There is no need to wait months to see fruits from our efforts. We live in a society where we only want fast results. It also mentions that we are going to believe that the heat comes from the furnace. I thought this to be funny as well, but it got me thinking. We no longer spend time in the outdoors that we no longer appreciate the heat given off by the sun.

The second quote that I liked was found on pg 264 and it states the following:

"Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization."

I like this quote because it carries a great truth. Before men had the idea of exploration and getting to know the unknown much of the land was wild. Not only was the land wild but the people that lived in the wilderness were also considered "wild" and "uncivilized." Our history is filled with stories of invasion and how the white race came to these wild lands to the rescue of these "uncivilized" people and lead them to civilization. We came to these lands and took the life out of the wilderness. The wilderness was too much for us to handle that we had to "perfect" it as if we were carving a chair from a piece of log. We scraped off the rough edges and cut out the unneeded pieces in order to meet our needs. The problem is that we are soon going to run out of this raw material through which we are creating our civilization.