Resonance and Vegetal Citizenship in Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac

The problem of ethical obligations to plants has rarely been raised in Western traditions of thought. However, it is central to Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, one of the key texts of modern American environmentalism. For Leopold, the effects of a civilisation on the vegetal base of the trophic pyramid are the ultimate measure of its value, and the principal failure of modern civilisation is that it blinds people to this fact. For humans to become proper citizens of the land community, they must build reciprocal relationships with other members of the community, which can be understood as relationships of resonance (H. Rosa). Crucially, this also includes plants, who are thus recognised as vegetal citizens. Leopold’s descriptions of his own relationships to the native flora, built over the course of a decade of ecological restoration work on his property in Sauk County, Wisconsin, must be viewed in this context.