Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold. The Wilderness Society.Born in Burlington, Iowa, in 1887, Aldo Leopold spent his boyhood years exploring and hunting in the nearby woods, swamps, and fields. On their many long hikes, his father taught Aldo and his brother and sister how to "see" many of nature's mysteries.

Leopold went east for high school, to Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, where his love of the outdoors took a heavy toll on his grades. "My dear Mama," he wrote home in 1904, "You probably know from my report that I have flunked Geometry..." Leopold survived high school and began college at Yale, with the idea of obtaining a graduate degree from the University's brand new School of Forestry. 

Founding the Nation's First Wilderness Area

With degrees in hand, Leopold joined the Forest Service in 1909, advancing swiftly as a ranger and supervisor in New Mexico. By 1919, his thinking had evolved from a narrow focus on forestry and game management to an increasingly firm conviction that America was losing too much wilderness.

 In 1924, in the process of transferring to the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison,
Wisconsin, Leopold convinced the Forest Service to protect as wilderness 500,000 acres of New Mexico's Gila National Forest. It was the National Forest System's first officially designated wilderness area.

Unhappy at the laboratory, Leopold left in 1928 to earn a living as a consulting forester. Soon thereafter, his reputation as an expert on game management paid off. In 1933 the University of Wisconsin offered him a professorship to teach in the nation's first graduate program in that subject.

Founding The Wilderness Society

Two years later, with the rapid loss of wilderness in America weighing heavily on his mind, Leopold joined seven other leading conservationists to form The Wilderness Society. Also in 1935, Leopold purchased a run-down farm on the Wisconsin River. The entire family — wife Estella and five children — rebuilt the only standing structure, a chicken coop, into a small cabin the family slept in. The cabin came to be known as "The Shack." For years thereafter, the Leopolds spent their weekends at the Shack, planting thousands upon thousands of trees as they worked to restore the land's health.

Weekends of planting, hiking, and observing nature further sharpened Leopold's thinking about the relationship of people to the land and their moral obligation to take better care of it. Those weekends also provided the material he needed to write his most famous book, A Sand County Almanac. Published in 1949, the Almanac captured the wonders of nature Leopold saw all around him at the Shack. 

The Land Ethic

It also laid out a startlingly innovative idea, called the "land ethic." This was to be a new way of thinking and acting toward the land, one that would teach us to live with greater reverence for its ability to support all manner of life. Sadly, Leopold did not live to see his book published. He died in 1948 helping fight a wildfire near the Shack. 

Yet, Leopold's legacy is a powerful one. Fifty years later, the Shack and the surrounding preserve are a picture of health, with maturing forests and restored prairie. Fifty years later, the Almanac continues to inspire new generations of Americans to take up the cause of saving the best of what's left. And 50 years later, the land ethic continues to serve as the guiding beacon for The Wilderness Society and thousands of other wilderness-loving Americans.

photo: Aldo Leopold at his desk, 1942. Courtesy University of Wisconsin - Madison.

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