Wisconsin’s sand county odyssey, part 1: seeing a world in a grain of sand — and Homeric echoes in a Leopold essay

Beyond its function as an ecological parable, there is much in “Odyssey” to provoke a careful reader to wonder whether Leopold intended a more deeply layered allegory. As a Yale graduate, Leopold was well acquainted with Greek myth and the classics, and would have understood that the name of Homer’s title character in the famous epic poem literally means “trouble.”