Aldo Leopold was born in 1887 in Burlington, Iowa, the son of a walnut desk maker who taught him woodcraft and hunting. He catalogued birds as a boy, prepared at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and graduated from the Yale Forestry School in 1909, when forestry meant managing woods as a crop and killing predators to boost game. The U.S. Forest Service posted him to the Arizona and New Mexico territories, including the Apache and Carson National Forests, where he shot a wolf and watched the vivid spark of life fade from its eyes. Over the following years he saw deer populations explode without wolves, strip the vegetation and erode the soil before starving.
In 1916 he toured New Mexico founding Game Protection Associations, then wrote the Grand Canyon’s first management plan and the Forest Service’s first game and fish handbook. A 1921 article argued for areas where roads would be banned, and in 1924 the Gila Wilderness Area in New Mexico, over 750,000 acres, became the first designated wilderness of its kind. He moved to the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, became the first professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin in 1933 and wrote the field’s foundational textbook. A 1935 trip to Germany and Austria showed him monoculture pine forests he regarded as biological deserts. He restored a ruined 80-acre farm in Wisconsin’s sand country and died of a heart attack in April 1948 while fighting a grass fire on a neighbor’s farm.
- His family spent every August on Marquette Island in Michigan observing nature.
- He wanted wilderness large enough to absorb a two-week pack trip with no roads, as Model T traffic pushed into scenic country.
- As research director of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum he worked to restore tallgrass prairie and oak savanna.
- His family hand-planted thousands of pines on the sand farm as windbreaks to hold the soil.
- All five of his children became naturalists or scientists, and his land ethic book appeared posthumously in 1949.
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