Leopold, Aldo (redirected from Aldo Leopold)

Leopold, Aldo, 1886–1948, American ecologist, b. Burlington, Iowa. He was an advocate for a "land ethic," in which humans see themselves as part of a natural community. After work in the U.S. Forest Service, he taught wildlife management at the Univ. of Wisconsin and helped found the Wilderness Society. In 1924, he succeeded in having the Gila National Forest in N.Mex. designated as the first extensive wilderness area in the United States. He wrote A Sand County Almanac (1949), which helped provide the impetus to the environmental movement.

Bibliography

See studies by C. Meine (1989) and T. Tanner, ed. (1989).

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Leopold, (Rand) Aldo

(born Jan. 11, 1887, Burlington, Iowa, U.S.—died April 24, 1948, near Madison, Wis.) U.S. environmentalist. After attending Yale University, he worked for the U.S. Forest Service (1909–28), mainly in the Southwest. In 1924 the country's first national wilderness area (Gila Wilderness Area in New Mexico) was created at Leopold's urging. From 1933 to 1948 he taught at the University of Wisconsin. A fervent campaigner for the preservation of wildlife and wilderness areas, he was a director of the Audubon Society from 1935 and became a founder of the Wilderness Society in the same year. His Game Management (1933) was followed in 1949 by the posthumous A Sand County Almanac, which eloquently called for the preservation of ecosystems. Read by millions, it strongly influenced the budding environmental movement.

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Leopold, (Rand) Aldo (1887–1948) conservationist, ecologist; born in Burlington, Iowa. He grew up a sportsman and a naturalist, graduated from Yale in 1908, and after a year in Yale's forestry school, joined the U.S. 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 totaling 14,000,000 acres.) He was with the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory from 1924–28 and then spent three years surveying game populations in the north-central 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." The concept, 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 book, 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 neighbor's farm.