1. 128 The "slave girls" at Odysseus's banquet, property without rights. Why, Savoy asks, isn't there a single reference in A Sand County Almanac to Africans enslaved in the U.S.? Why no mention of the strictly enforced racial segregation of the 1940s, manifest in the land ownership Leopold talked so much about? Why is there no mention of white violence against Blacks, hidden in dark farmland nights and wide-open in public eruptions in industrial towns and cities across the country? Savoy refuses to let Leopold off the hook for simple ignorance. Leopold, she points out, understood the power of various forms of elimination. He criticized it in relation to a kind of flower, but not in relation to an unfamiliar "human subspecies;Jr Henry Fairfield Osborn;her telling book Trace, Lauret Savoy, geologist and woman of African American, Euro-American, and Native American heritage, underscores Leopold's silence on U.S. slavery in
2. The popular "balance of nature" concept, Leopold suggested, was not an apt symbol because it conjured a too-simple and too-static weighing scale. A "truer picture" or "image" of land, he proposed-in his 1939 essay "A Biotic View of Land" and in the core of "The Land Ethic"-was a "biotic pyramid," which became the organizing core image of land health to which the land ethic pointed;Trace;It Is Absurd Leopold as much as anyone understood that thoughts have consequences