biography
| name: |
Leopold, (Rand) Aldo
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1887–1948)
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| biography:
| Conservationist and ecologist, born in Burlington, Iowa, USA. He grew up a sportsman and a naturalist, graduated from Yale (1908), and after a year in Yale's forestry school, joined the US Forest Service. Assigned to the Arizona-New Mexico district, he spent 15 years in the field, rising to chief of the district. By 1921 he had begun to campaign for the preservation of wildlife areas for recreational and aesthetic purposes. In 1924 the government, adopting his views on preservation, set aside 574 000 acres in New Mexico as the Gila Wilderness Area - the first of 78 such areas totalling 14 000 000 acres. He was with the US Forest Products Laboratory (1924–8) and then spent three years surveying game populations in the NC states. In 1933 he became professor of wildlife management at the University of Wisconsin, a position created specifically for him. Over the years, in addition to his pioneering research in game management, he worked out a philosophical concept he called ‘the land ethic’, about which he wrote ‘simply enlarges the boundaries of the (human) community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively the land’. After retiring from the university he bought a farm in the Wisconsin Dells. There, after several years of intense observation, he expanded his philosophy in A Sand County Almanac (published posthumously in 1949), which became the ‘bible’ of environmental activists of the 1960s and 1970s. He died of a heart attack while fighting a brush fire on a neighbour's farm. |
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