Aldo Leopold

The father of wildlife management.

One of the first conservationists to recognize the importance of protecting nongame species.

Author

• A Sand County Almanac• Game Management • The Pine Cone• American Game

Magazine• American Forests

Leopold’s Education and Early Career

• born in Burlington, Iowa in 1887

• M.S. forestry- Yale University- 1909

• moved to the Apache National Forest in Arizona Territory

• named deputy supervisor of the Carson National Forest of northern New Mexico- 1911

Leopold in Arizona Territory

Carson National Forest, NM

• promoted to supervisor of the Carson- 1913

• surveyed forests in the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

• caught in a blizzard on the continental divide

Leopold experienced predator control first hand at the Office of Grazing in

Albuquerque

Commercial Hunters in the Southwest

Leopold Defined Game Management

“the manipulation of factors that limited population growth in game species”.

The limiting factor approach

• Game censusing - numbers and distribution• Surveying population productivity - offspring• Installation of refuges• Controlled hunting - when, where, and how many• Predator control - elimination• Control of food and water availability• Control of vegetation• Planting, plowing, and burning• Disease control- actually a function of predators

Leopold eventually grew to reject predator control not because it was ineffective, but because it was ecologically unsound

Leopold Leaves The Southwest

Associate director of the Forest Service’s product laboratory in Madison, WI- 1924

• Consulting for Sporting Arms and Munitions Manufacturers- 1928

• National game surveys and research.

“The Professor”

Joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin 1933

valuable lessons about people and their relationship with the land

• Humans are part of the ecological community.

• “The disposal of private property to most land owners is purely a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong”

“In examining a question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends to do otherwise”

Leopold’s Legacy

• A Sand County Almanac published in 1949 by Oxford Univ. Press.

• More than one million copies have been sold since, and only 20,000 before 1960.

Leopold died in 1948, while fighting a brush fire on a neighbor’s farm.

Leopold would have been appointed to the position of advisor on conservation for the United Nations.