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 across the Midwest provided Leopold with a passion for conservation as he tramped the region's rapidly diminishing prairies and river bottoms, seeing first-hand the damaging effects of habitat destruction on wildlife populations. After earning a master's degree in forestry from Yale in 1909, Leopold entered the U.S. Forest Service. His first job took him to New Mexico, where he would be instrumental in establishing the Gila National Wilderness, the nation's first official wilderness area.

In 1924 Leopold settled in Madison, Wisconsin, where he continued to work for the cause of conservation. His early work Game Management (1933), established him as the nation's preeminent authority on wildlife conservation. As a result, in 1933 Leopold was offered a position at the University of Wisconsin, in the nation's first graduate program in wildlife management.

In 1935, Leopold purchased an abandoned farm in Sauk County on the banks of the Wisconsin River. The tract of abused land quickly became a laboratory where Leopold could experiment with methods of reestablishing ecological health to a damaged landscape, and where he could endeavor to understand humanity's proper role in the natural world.

Leopold's experiences rehabilitating the land found their way into a series of essays that would [Page 1040]become A Sand County Almanac. The book's key contribution to American environmental thought is its deft introduction of ecological concepts into the discussion of humanity's place in nature. Whereas earlier nature writers, such as Henry Thoreau and John Muir, had intuited an interconnected relationship to the nonhuman world, Leopold was able to use the emergent scientific discipline of ecology as the basis of his philosophical argument that each human should regard himself or herself as a “plain member and citizen” of a “land community,” rather than a “conqueror” of nature.

Leopold's text is part of a tradition of American nature writing stretching back to Thoreau's Walden (1854), a tradition that blends an isolated narrator's first-person account of the workings of nature with broad social commentary. In both works, a simplified, more nature-centered existence becomes the vehicle for a critique of an increasingly technological, and increasingly misguided, American society.

In the book's final section, titled “The Upshot,” Leopold addresses the ethical and philosophical changes that he saw as necessary to reverse the environmental losses of 20th century America. In the most influential of the final essays, “The Land Ethic,” Leopold called for a radical rejection of land use decisions based on economics, suggesting instead that ethical consideration be granted to all members of “the land-community.”

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