Aldo Leopold
Conservationist Aldo Leopold was born in Burlington, Iowa and moved to Wisconsin in 1924,
when he became associate director of the
Forest Products Laboratory.
His book, "A Sand County Almanac," was published in 1949 and spurred the environmental
movement and a widespread interest in ecology as a science. Leopold was openly critical of
the harm he believed was frequently done to land out of a sense of a culture or society's
feeling of ownership over that land. He felt that the security that came from the
"mechanization" of the world should give people more time to enjoy the precious qualities
of nature, and to learn more about it.
In 1933 he was appointed to a chair of game
management at the UW (the first to be established in this country), where he was professor
of wildlife management until his death in 1948. On his foundation's Web site is a quote
from Leopold: "That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is
to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics."
