Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold was born in 1887 in Burlington, Iowa, United States of America, the eldest of four children of Carl and Clara Leopold. He was the grandson of a German immigrant who made his name as a landscape architect, author of several parks in Burlington. Even as a child, he was enthusiastic about contact with nature, a pursuit encouraged by his father, and he was drawn to forestry studies from an early age, graduating in 1909 from Yale School of Forestry. That same year he joined the United States Forest Service, created only four years earlier. Since at least 1915, his civic activity in the field of nature conservation has been noteworthy, helping to create associations for the protection of game species and editing the newsletter. Pine CodeIn 1928 he left the Forest Service and began working as a consultant. In 1933 he took over the chair of game management in the agricultural economics department at the University of Wisconsin. In 1935, he became one of the founders of Wilderness Society (Society for the Wild). He published numerous articles and some books, and meanwhile conceived a book project that would become very special and for whose publication he fought hard in the last years of his life. He wrote it based both on his profound scientific training, his philosophy and activity as a conservationist, and also on the experience provided by the family farm, acquired in 1935 in the Baraboo Sands region, Wisconsin. The ecological essays gathered in this book would only be published, with the now celebrated title, An Almanac of Sand County...even after his death in the fall of 1949. In fact, on April 21, 1948, he had succumbed to a heart attack while helping to fight a fire on a neighboring farm near his own, close to the Wisconsin River. Today his influence is immense. In the vein of John Muir, founder of the conservation movement, Aldo is the inspiring figure of a new breath of life, inaugurating the modern phase of the movement from a clearly ecological perspective. Reading and rereading him, we will always find new treasures, never tarnished.