More than 60 years after its publication, Aldo Leopold’s "A Sand County Almanac" continues to influence conversations about the relationship between people and the land. It also inspired Wisconsin musician Tim Southwick Johnson, who set many of Leopold’s themes and words to music.
Like many Wisconsinites, Johnson said he knew Leopold’s name but he hadn’t read his seminal work. When he finally picked it up, he said it changed him. And being a songwriter, Johnson soon began to think that many of Leopold’s words and insights could be set to music.
“As I read through some of the early chapters, I kept running across lines that I thought, ‘well, that’d make a great song,’” said Johnson.
So, he started writing songs, both to enrich his personal connection with Leopold but also as a way to share Leopold’s legacy with others. He visited the Leopold Shack along the Wisconsin River in Baraboo, where Leopold lived amid the Wisconsin landscape that he described in his almanac. Johnson even had the rare pleasure of spending the night in the shack.
“It was just getting dark when I drove over there, lit the oil lamps, went down to the river and watched the cranes fly overhead, just as you would expect,” said Johnson. “I had a really nice, restful night, and woke up at the crack of dawn and played music, of course.”
It wasn’t the first time the shack had played host to musicians. Johnson says the whole Leopold family loved music and always brought along guitars for weekend trips to the shack.
Leopold and his wife Estella and their five children lived very close to the land. They fixed up the chicken coop that became the “Shack,” established a garden, and planted some 40,000 trees on land that had been ravaged by fire and overgrazed by cattle. Using only binoculars and a notebook, Leopold recorded the wildlife and other seasonal patterns he observed at his home that became the basis of "A Sand County Almanac." Inside the shack is where Leopold wrote his now famous finale to the almanac, an essay called “Land Ethic” that defined a new relationship between humans and nature. “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land,” wrote Leopold.
Johnson said he hopes his songs can introduce others to Leopold without being moralizing or preachy.
“If what I have done opens the eyes and ears of more people to his message, that’s a great thing,” said Johnson. “Spreading the word about his land ethic, living lighter on the land, I’m really honored to even be a tiny, tiny part of that.”
