The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quotations and Commentaries

Editors' Note

Editors' Note We have arranged the quotations in each chapter of this volume in as close to chronological order as can be determined from the bibliographic and archival records. A list of sources, in the order of their original publication, is at the end of the volume. A comprehensive chronological list of the publications ofAIdo Leopold can be found in The River a/the Mother a/God and Othernssays fry Aldo Leopold (pp. 349-70). In most cases the quotations could easily be placed in chronological order. Occasionally, however, choosing among different text versions, and hence providing dates, proved problematic. AIdo Leopold regularly revised his own writings as opportunities for republication of his work arose. A given passage may have appeared in print several times during his lifetime, Leopold fine-tuning his prose at each turn. In addition, many of his writings first appeared in print only posthumously. To resolve these difficulties, we have adhered to the following method. For all quotations, a date of publication or composition is provided. For materials first published during Leopold's lifetime, the date and the title of the original publication are provided. For materials first published in A Sand County Almanac, the date "1949" is used. For materials that had been published earlier and that were incorporated into A Sand County Almanac, the date and the title of the original publication are given. We have chosen, however, to use the text from the Almanac, to accommodate any final adjustments Leopold may have made in language. In most cases, the differences between versions of a given passage are minor. For two essays, however-"Wilderness " and 'The Land Ethic"-the distinctions are more important. Both essays were newly synthesized for the Almanac, with Leopold extracting , revising, and melding passages from older essays, and supplementing them with new text. In some instances we have provided a cross-reference to the earlier essay; the notation "cf." indicates that the versions differ. For materials first published in Round River, the date of composition is given. Quotations from materials that remain unpublished (or that, in a few cases, have been published only in part) are indicated by the abbrevixx Editors' Note XXI ation "ms." Most of these works date from the 1940s. Where the exact date of composition is unknown, an approximate date is provided (e.g., "c. 1942"). To assist the reader in referring to the full text from which a quotation has been selected, all materials published or republished posthumously are accompanied by references, with page numbers, to the works in which they have appeared: ASCA, for A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (1949) ; RR, for Round River:From theJournals ofAldo Leopold (1953); RMG, for The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays !Jy Aldo Leopold (1991); and ALS, for Aldo Leopold's Southwest (1995). Page numbers are also provided for quotations from Leopold's Report on a Game Survey ofthe North Central States (1931) and Game Management (1933). We have used the 1949 edition of A Sand County Almanac and the 1953 edition of Round River, rather than the later combined edition that was first published in 1966. Page numbers refer to these earlier editions, which remain in print. In reproducing the quotations for this volume we have observed the following practices. We have generally retained the punctuation, spelling , and capitalization of the original text, but in a few cases we have silently corrected obvious misprints. We have used ellipsis dots to indicate an omission and brackets to indicate the alteration or addition of a word or phrase to allow the quotation to flow more easily. The first line of a quotation begins with a paragraph indention if it stood at the beginning of the paragraph in the original text; if it occurred within the paragraph , it is flush left here. If a quotation is drawn from more than one paragraph, material from subsequent paragraphs is indented; ellipsis dots introducing the paragraph indicate the omission of words or sentences preceding the quoted material. ...