This is the final passage in the final essay of A Sand County Almanac. Leopold begins by criticizing an approach to the land that privileges the gathering of trophies over the health of the land itself. This kind of relationship with the land inherently degrades it, because it requires a person to only engage with land that has some kind of tangible, physical value, and then extract that value in the form of a fish caught in a river, or a deer shot in the woods.

For people who only see the land for what it can offer them, land…