Aldo Leopold

He was christened Rand Aldo Leopold, after two of his father's business partners, and dropped the Rand. German was the first language in the Burlington house. His father Carl made walnut desks, was first cousin to his own wife, and took the children into the woods to teach them woodcraft and shooting. The boy spent hours counting and cataloguing the birds near home, and his sister remembered him always out on the bluffs or across the river. In 1900 Gifford Pinchot gave Yale the money for one of the country's first forestry schools, and the teenager decided that was the job. His parents sent him to Lawrenceville in January 1904 to improve his chances. He entered Sheffield Scientific School, and took his Yale forestry degree in 1909.

The Forest Service sent him to District 3 in the Arizona and New Mexico territories, first at the Apache National Forest and from 1911 at the Carson. He wrote the first management plan for the Grand Canyon and the agency's first game and fish handbook. In 1916 he toured New Mexico organizing sportsmen, and the association he proposed drew more than 1,000 members to its first convention. In 1921 he argued in the Journal of Forestry for keeping country roadless, and in 1924 the Forest Service set aside 755,000 acres of the Gila as the first designated wilderness area anywhere. He moved to the Forest Products Laboratory at Madison that year and left the agency in 1928. In 1933 he published Game Management and took the first professorship in the subject. He helped found the Wilderness Society in 1935.

The man who invented American wilderness policy had begun by shooting the animals it protects. His early job was killing bears, wolves and mountain lions for ranchers losing stock. The account of the change — the she-wolf, the fierce green fire going out of her eyes — is his own, written decades afterward during the Second World War, and the record dates the incident only loosely, to about 1909 or 1910. What is firmly on the record is what he did with the conclusion. He argued that removing the top predator did not produce more game, it produced too many deer, then stripped hillsides, then erosion. In 1935 he bought 80 acres of Wisconsin sand country that had been logged, burned, and grazed to bare ground, and spent 13 years planting it back. The only building was a chicken coop.

He died of a heart attack on April 21, 1948, at 61, helping neighbors fight a grass fire near that farm. He is buried at Aspen Grove Cemetery in Burlington. His son Luna assembled A Sand County Almanac from his notes and Oxford published it in 1949. Almost nobody noticed. A paperback became a surprise bestseller during the environmental awakening of the 1970s, and the book has since passed two million copies in at least 14 languages. All five children became scientists. The shack and farm became a National Historic Landmark in 2009. In January 1995, carrying the first grey wolf back into Yellowstone, Bruce Babbitt said he thought about the man who helped remove them.

Aldo Leopold's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Wilderness and Its Place in Forest Recreational Policy article
  The Journal of Forestry essay that made the case for roadless country 1921
• Gila Wilderness Area other
  755,000 acres, the first designated wilderness area in the world 1924
• Game Management book
  The founding textbook of wildlife management as a science 1933
• The Wilderness Society company
  Co-founded to expand and defend the nation's wilderness areas 1935
• Marshland Elegy article
  Written when Wisconsin was down to 25 breeding pairs of sandhill cranes 1937
• A Sand County Almanac book
  Assembled by his son Luna and published a year after his death 1949

• January 1904 aged 16 Sent to the Lawrenceville School to improve his odds at Yale He had decided to be a forester after Gifford Pinchot funded the Yale school in 1900.
• 1909 aged ~22 Takes his forestry degree and is posted to the Apache National Forest Part of the job was killing bears, wolves and mountain lions for ranchers.
• 1912 aged ~25 Marries Estella Bergere in northern New Mexico
• March 1916 aged 29 The New Mexico Game Protection Association holds its first convention More than 1,000 members joined after his speaking tour.
• 1924 aged ~37 The Forest Service designates 755,000 acres of the Gila as wilderness The first such designation anywhere. He transferred to Madison the same year.
• 1933 aged ~46 Publishes Game Management and takes the first chair in the subject At the University of Wisconsin, with the arboretum research directorship alongside it.
• 1935 aged ~48 Buys the exhausted sand-country farm and helps found the Wilderness Society He also toured German and Austrian forests that year, his only trip abroad.
• April 21, 1948 aged 61 Dies of a heart attack fighting a neighbor's grass fire The almanac manuscript was finished. He was 61.
• 1949 aged ~62 A Sand County Almanac is published and barely noticed A 1970s paperback edition turned it into a bestseller.

• Gifford Pinchot 1865–1946
  First chief of the U.S. Forest Service and leading advocate of scientific conservation and managed public lands. funded the school he trained in
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. rejected his utilitarian conservation
• John Muir 1838–1914
  Naturalist and organizer whose advocacy helped create national parks and the modern wilderness movement. earlier advocate for wild land
• Rachel Carson 1907–1964
  Marine biologist whose book Silent Spring launched the modern environmental movement. wrote the other founding book
• Henry David Thoreau 1817–1862
  Writer and philosopher whose works on nature, individual conscience, and civil disobedience influenced environmentalism and political protest. read and drew on
• Wendell Berry b. 1934
  Writer and farmer whose work connected environmental stewardship, local agriculture, community, and opposition to industrial excess. carried the land ethic forward