Aldo Leopold

Biography

American ecologist, forester and natural-resource manager, born in Burlington, Iowa, in 1887 and educated in forestry at Yale. He spent much of his career with the US Forest Service and later held a chair in wildlife management at the University of Wisconsin; posterity knows him as a father of ecological ethics. In 1935 he bought a worn-out farm along the Wisconsin River and set about restoring its ecology, the place later known as Sand County. His field notes and philosophical essays were edited posthumously by his son Luna Leopold and published by Oxford University Press in 1949 as A Sand County Almanac, whose concluding essay The Land Ethic argues for converting humanity from conqueror of the land-community into a plain member of it, making the book a founding text of modern environmental ethics. He died in April 1948 while fighting a wildfire on a neighbour’s farm. His children founded the non-profit Aldo Leopold Foundation in 1982, which maintains the historic farmstead.