A Sand County Almanac

While roads carry people out of cities and into nature, they also pose a threat to that nature. Roads therefore embody one of the central tensions in the book: the line between respecting the land and loving it too much.

While roads facilitate the exploitation of natural resources, they promote outdoor recreation. Thus, even after areas have been rehabilitated to serve as wilderness, they are still divided up by roads, as is the case in a Wisconsin marsh Leopold describes, where “a roadless marsh is seemingly as worthless to the alphabetical conservationist as an undrained one was to the empire builders” (107). In this way, we can see the fundamental lack of respect for nature that is at the heart of many modern conservation efforts; rather than protecting nature for its own sake, many conservationists preserve nature solely for human purposes, which—in the case of roads, for example—can be antithetical to the well-being of the land.

Roads also represent the accelerating pace of human life, which engenders disconnect from the land and increases the damage inflicted by human activities. In Part 1, Leopold describes sitting in a grove of tamaracks, listening to the cars pass by on the highway; from the perspective of drivers, the landscape is a wasteland, which they’re passing through too quickly to observe in detail. On foot, however, Leopold is able to monitor the landscape for signs that lead him to grouse hiding in the brush. This idea also applies to another form of hunter—those who scour the wilderness in search of opportunities to commune with nature but in fact spend much of their time in the car: “Everywhere is the unspecialized motorist whose recreation is mileage, who has run the gamut of the National Parks in one summer and now is headed for Mexico City and points south” (282). Roads for hunters also cause environmental damage, as they fragment ecosystems and make it harder for species to thrive.

Roads, which make it easier to access nature, also stand in direct contrast to that which is valuable in nature, for many people: the experience of isolation. In this way, roads represent the land deprived of wildness, where access is easy, the route is pre-determined, and humans are the animal most frequently observed. By contrast, Leopold describes a true experience of the wilderness as one in which travel is slow, inefficient, and exhausting, where the path contains many digressions and hazards, and where humans sense themselves as part of a broader biological community rather than as conquerors of it.