Discover the Best Books Written by Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold was an American writer, philosopher, naturalist, scientist, ecologist, forester, conservationist, and environmentalist. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin and is best known for his book A Sand County Almanac (1949), which was translated into fourteen languages and sold more than two million copies.

Leopold was influential in developing modern environmental ethics and the movement for wilderness conservation. His nature and wildlife preservation ethics profoundly impacted the ecological movement with his ecocentric or holistic ethics regarding land. In addition, he emphasized biodiversity and ecology and was a founder of the science of wildlife management.

In 1909, Leopold was assigned to the Forest Service's District 3 in the Arizona and New Mexico territories. At first, he was a forest assistant at the Apache National Forest in the Arizona Territory. Then, in 1911, he was transferred to the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico. Leopold's career, which kept him in New Mexico until 1924, included developing the first comprehensive management plan for the Grand Canyon, writing the Forest Service's first game and fish handbook, and proposing Gila Wilderness Area, the first national wilderness area in the Forest Service system.

On April 5, 1923, he was elected an associate member (now called "professional member") of the Boone and Crockett Club, a wildlife conservation organization founded by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell. In 1924, he accepted a transfer to the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, and became an associate director.

In 1933, he was appointed Professor of Game Management in the Agricultural Economics Department at the University of Wisconsin, the first such professorship of wildlife management. At the same time, he was named Research Director of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Arboretum. Leopold and other members of the first Arboretum Committee initiated a research agenda around re-establishing "original Wisconsin" landscape and plant communities, particularly those that predated European settlement, such as tallgrass prairie and oak savanna.

Under the Oberlaender Trust of the Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation, Leopold was part of the 1935 group of six U.S. Forest Service associates who toured the forests of Germany and Austria. Leopold was explicitly invited to study game management, and this was his first and only time abroad. His European observations would have a significant impact on his ecological thinking.