The Leopold Writing Program invites New Mexico students in grades 6-12 to submit original essays for their 2025 Writing Contest. Students are asked to consider the following and then respond to the essay prompt below:
Aldo 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."
THE 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.
Cash prizes will be awarded to the winning essayists in three grade categories: 6-7, 8-9, and 10-12.
Submissions must be turned in by midnight on Feb. 14.
For complete instructions and an entry form, visit leopoldwritingprogram.org and follow the Writing Contest link.
