How To: Fix What's Not Broken

“The world has shrunk to those mean dimensions known to county clerks,” said Aldo Leopold in his book, A Sand County Almanac (44). In other words, Leopold is pointing out that people’s appreciation of land and the world they see has been reduced to what can be expressed on paper, such as acreage and square-footage. This mindset is the result of England’s system of equating land ownership with political power, because this motivated colonial settlers to claim land as far as the eye could see when they first began establishing families and governments on the east coast. Leopold is trying to express how this system of acquiring power has resulted in people regarding land as “a commodity belonging to us,” (vii) rather than a community we are members of along with all other living and nonliving things. Unfortunately for this community, more and more people came to America and ‘purchased’ land for themselves, and over time, as land became less available for purchasing, America has been reduced to the metropolis we know today. Some might think that the driving out of all the good (the wilderness) and replacing it with the bad and the ugly (industry and urbanization) has been an improvement, but the reality is that this process has caused America to regress as a whole.