Leopold, Aldo (1887–1948)

Ecologist, educator, and pioneering wildlife manager, Aldo Leopold is best known as the author of A Sand County Almanac (1949), a work that explored humanity's proper role in what he referred to as “the land community.” Part natural history, part philosophical exploration, and part radical environmental manifesto, Leopold's Sand County Almanac begins as a series of natural history essays detailing his rehabilitation of a wornout farm in Wisconsin, and ends as a philosophical treatise that calls for nothing short of a complete realignment of the ethical relationship between humanity and nature.

Leopold was born on January 11, 1887 in Burlington, Iowa. His boyhood was divided between the study of history and literature inside the classroom, and ornithology and woods-lore outside the classroom. Hunting and camping trips ...