(Rand) Aldo Leopold - Life and work, Conservation

Conservationist and ecologist, born in Burlington, Iowa, USA. He grew up a sportsman and a naturalist, graduated from Yale (1908), and after a year in Yale's forestry school, joined the US Forest Service. Assigned to the Arizona-New Mexico district, he spent 15 years in the field, rising to chief of the district. By 1921 he had begun to campaign for the preservation of wildlife areas for recreational and aesthetic purposes. In 1924 the government, adopting his views on preservation, set aside 574 000 acres in New Mexico as the Gila Wilderness Area - the first of 78 such areas totalling 14 000 000 acres. He was with the US Forest Products Laboratory (1924–8) and then spent three years surveying game populations in the NC states. In 1933 he became professor of wildlife management at the University of Wisconsin, a position created specifically for him. Over the years, in addition to his pioneering research in game management, he worked out a philosophical concept he called ‘the land ethic’, about which he wrote ‘simply enlarges the boundaries of the (human) community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively the land’. After retiring from the university he bought a farm in the Wisconsin Dells. There, after several years of intense observation, he expanded his philosophy in A Sand County Almanac (published posthumously in 1949), which became the ‘bible’ of environmental activists of the 1960s and 1970s. He died of a heart attack while fighting a brush fire on a neighbour's farm.

Aldo Leopold (January 11, 1887 - April 21, 1948) was a United States ecologist, forester, and environmentalist. Aldo Leopold is considered to be the father of wildlife management in the United States and was a life-long fisherman and hunter. Leopold died in 1948 from a heart attack, while fighting a brush fire on a neighbor's farm.

Life and work

Aldo Leopold was born in Burlington, Iowa.

For secondary education Leopold attended the prestigious Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, after which he moved on to the Yale University School of Forestry. Leopold developed an appreciation for nature in terms of ecology, beauty and mystery, as well as in terms of a source of resources.

Leopold served for 19 years in the United States Forest Service, working in the American Southwest (New Mexico and Arizona) until he was transferred in 1924 to the Forest Products Lab in Madison, Wisconsin. He mostly did wildlife and game surveys throughout the U.S.

In 1933 he was appointed Professor of Game Management in the Agricultural Economics Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

An advocate for the preservation of wildlife and wilderness areas, Leopold became a founder of The Wilderness Society in 1935. Named in his honor, the Aldo Leopold Wilderness lies within the boundaries of the Gila National Forest, in New Mexico. Together, these two tracts often are considered the starting point for the modern wilderness-conservation movement throughout the U.S.

Leopold offered frank criticism of the harm he believed was frequently done to natural systems (such as land) out of a sense of a culture or society's sovereign ownership over the land base – eclipsing any sense of a community of life to which humans belong.

A Sand County Almanac

Leopold wrote A Sand County Almanac (hardcover ISBN 0-19-505305-2, paperback ISBN 0-345-34505-3), which has been read by millions and has informed and spurred the environmental movement and a widespread interest in ecology as a science.

Published in 1949, shortly after Leopold's death, A Sand County Almanac is a combination of natural history, scene painting with words, and philosophy.

Conservation

In "The Land Ethic," a chapter of A Sand County Almanac, Leopold delves into conservation in "The Ecological Conscience" section.

Leopold felt it was generally agreed that more conservation education was needed;

As it seemed to Leopold, curriculum-content guidelines current at the time he was writing (late 1940s) boiled down to: obey the law, vote right, join some organizations and practice what conservation is profitable on your own land;

This fact brought him to the conclusion that obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to land.

Ethical issues

With the hopes of addressing ethical issues as well as educational challenges, Leopold put forward an example in the issue of Wisconsin's southwestern topsoil slipping seaward. In response, the Wisconsin Legislature passed the Soil Conservation District Law in 1937 that allowed farmers to write rules for land use themselves. Even with the additional incentives of free technical service and the availability of specialized machinery for loan, rules that would benefit the community continued to be ignored as no rules were written.