On this SlideShare page, you will find several Power Point presentations, one for each of the most popular essays to read aloud from A Sand County Almanac at Aldo Leopold Weekend events. Each presentation has the essay text right on the slides, paired with beautiful images that help add a visual element to public readings. Dave Winefske (Aldo Leopold Weekend event planner from Argyle, Wisconsin) gets credit for putting these together. Thanks Dave!

A note on images within the presentations: we have only received permission to use these images within these presentations, as part of this event. You will see a photo credit slide as the last image in every presentation. Please be sure to show that slide to your audience at least once, and if you don't mind leaving it up to show at the end of each essay, that is best. Also please note that we do not have permission to use these images outside of Aldo Leopold Weekend reading event presentations. For example, the images that come from the Aldo Leopold Foundation archive are not “public domain,” yet we see unauthorized uses of them all the time on the internet. So, hopefully that’s enough said on this topic—if you have any questions, just let us know. mail@aldoleopold.org

If you download these presentations to use in your event, feel free to delete this intro slide before showing to your audience.

The Green Pasture

Some paintings become famous because, being durable,they are viewed by successive generations, in each of which are likely to be found a few appreciative eyes.

I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all, except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush, and it is the same river who, before I can bring my friends to view his work, erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind's eye.

Like other artists, my river is temperamental; there is no predicting when the mood to paint will come upon him, or how long it will last.

But in midsummer, when the great white fleets cruise the sky for day after flawless day, it is worth strolling down to the sandbars just to see

whether he has been at work. The work begins with a broad ribbon of silt brushed thinly on the sand of a receding shore.

As this dries slowly in the sun, goldfinches bathe in its pools, and deer, herons, killdeers, raccoons, and turtles cover it with a lacework of tracks. There is no telling, at this stage, whether anything further will happen.

But when I see the silt ribbon turning green with Eleocharis, I watch closely thereafter, for this is the sign that the river is in a painting mood.

Almost overnight the Eleocharis becomes a thick turf, so lush and so dense that the meadow mice from the adjoining upland cannot resist the temptation. They move en masse to the green pasture, and apparently spend the nights rubbing their ribs in its velvety depths.

A maze of neatly tended mouse-trails bespeaks their enthusiasm. The deer walk up and down in it, apparently just for the pleasure of feeling it underfoot. Even a stay-at-home mole has tunneled his way across the dry bar to the Eleocharis ribbon, where he can heave and hump the verdant sod to his heart's content.

At this stage the seedlings of plants too numerous to count & too young to recognize spring to life from the damp warm sand under the green ribbon.

To view the painting, give the river three more weeks of solitude, and then visit the bar on some bright morning just after the sun has melted the daybreak fog.

The artist has now laid his colors, and sprayed them with dew. The

Eleocharis sod, greener than ever,

is now spangled with blue mimulus, pink dragon-head, and the milk-white blooms of Sagittaria.

Here and there a cardinal flower thrusts a red spear skyward.

At the head of the bar, purple ironweeds

and pale pink joe-pyes stand tall against the wall of willows. And if you have come quietly & humbly, as you should to any spot that can be beautiful only once,

you may surprise a fox-red deer, standing

knee-high in the garden of his delight.

Do not return for a second view of the green pasture, forthere is none. Either falling water has dried it out, or rising water has scoured the bar to its original austerity of clean sand. But in your mind you may hang up your picture, and hope that in some other summer the mood to paint may come upon the river.

Photo Credits• Historic photographs: Aldo Leopold Foundation archives

• A Sand County Almanac photographs by Michael Sewell

• David Wisnefske, Sugar River Valley Pheasants Forever, Wisconsin Environmental Education Board, Wisconsin Environmental Education Foundation, Argyle Land Ethic Academy (ALEA)

• UW Stevens Point Freckmann Herbarium, R. Freckmann, V.Kline, E. Judziewicz, K. Kohout, D. Lee, K Sytma, R. Kowal, P. Drobot, D. Woodland, A. Meeks, R. Bierman

• Curt Meine, (Aldo Leopold Biographer)

• Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Environmental Education for Kids (EEK)

• Hays Cummins, Miami of Ohio University

• Leopold Education Project, Ed Pembleton

• Bird Pictures by Bill Schmoker

• Pheasants Forever, Roger Hill

• Ruffed Grouse Society

• US Fish and Wildlife Service and US Forest Service

• Eric Engbretson

• James Kurz

• Owen Gromme Collection

• John White & Douglas Cooper

• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

• Ohio State University Extension, Buckeye Yard and Garden Online

• New Jersey University, John Muir Society, Artchive.com, and Labor Law Talk