Students, as part of your preparation, we encourage you to read “The Land Ethic” and other essays by Aldo Leopold. These can be found in A Sand County Almanac, available at local libraries, bookstores, and on the internet.
We have also included additional activities that can help students to come up with ideas for their essays. Click below to access a list of additional resources for teachers and students to help them engage with the writing prompt, the Writing Contest scoring rubric, and a Dear Body of Water supplemental activity.
Please consider the following, and then respond to the ESSAY PROMPT below.
Aldo Leopold is most widely known as the author of A Sand County Almanac (1949) in which he articulates his land ethic: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
Leopold believed our idea of “community” should be enlarged to include non-human elements such as soils, waters, plants, animals.
In his essay “Song of the [Río] Gavilan” in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold writes: "This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it ... you must know the speech of hills and rivers … Then you may hear it—a vast pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries."
Essay Prompt
Write about the song or melody that you hear in a body of water (such as a stream, river, lake, acequia, ocean, etc.) and what you would answer back.
PLEASE NOTE: The length of the essays varies by category, noted below. Please be sure that your essay adheres to these minimum/maximum requirements. We request that you include WORD COUNT on the last page of your essay after your final line. Thank you!
CATEGORIES Grades 6-7300-500 words Grades 8-9400-600 words Grades 10-12500-700 words
AWARDS Cash prizes will be awarded.
CONTEST PARAMETERS
Students must submit ORIGINAL work.
Both student and sponsoring teacher must sign the contest entry form affirming that the essay is original and not assisted by AI software. All essays will be run through AI testing software.
One essay submission per person.
Essays must be uploaded as a PDF file.
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
Here is a step-by-step guide to submitting your essay.
Save the essay as a PDF file and ATTACH to the Jotform Submission Portal. Please DO NOT send links to Google Drive!
1. Essays may be typed or handwritten. Save your essay as a PDF file, using the format [Student Name] ESSAY. Include the word count of your essay on the last page or bottom of the document.
Click on the link above tobring up the entry form in your browser. Each line provides a space to type in the information requested.
Fill in all of the form fields COMPLETELY, using correct spelling, punctuation, and capitalization.
Upload the PDF of your essay into the entry form. Please be sure to include the word count of your essay at the bottom of the PDF. Ex: WORD COUNT: 489 words.
Do NOT include your name at the top of your essay, so that judging can be anonymous.
The next step is to obtain the Sponsoring TEACHER's information, signature, and date. Make sure you allow enough time for your teacher to complete this section, in order to submit your essay and entry form by the deadline. Be sure to save the file again after the teacher information is entered.
3. We are requesting that you fill out an additional form (Student Demographic Information). This form asks questions about you that are important to the Leopold Writing Program for collecting data to test that our Contest recruitment efforts are achieving diversity within New Mexico's Grades 6-12 population. Responses to these questions are voluntary. Your responses will be unconnected from your application, and will not be visible to the panel of judges evaluating your essay. The aggregate information collected through this form will be kept private. There will be no impact on your application if you choose not to answer any of these questions. Thank you for helping us to collect important data!
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? After essays are judged, the award-winning students and their teachers will be notified in April, and results will be announced on the Writing Contest page.