A pair of notable anniversaries in environmental circles are occurring this year, both owing to Aldo Leopold, hailed as the father of modern conservation and wildlife ecology who carried out much of his groundbreaking work while living in Wisconsin, where his legacy endures.
“When you travel outside of Wisconsin, everyone talks about what an amazing conversation heritage this state has and how rich and deep it is. Leopold is so much a part of that,” Aldo Leopold Foundation President Buddy Huffaker said.
A forester, philosopher, conservationist, educator, writer and outdoor enthusiast, Leopold landed in Wisconsin in 1924 following a U.S. Forest Service transfer to Madison, where he continued to study ecology and environmental conservation. In 1933, he published the first textbook in the field of wildlife management and later accepted a new professorship in game management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a first of its kind.
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Leopold and his family initiated their own ecological restoration experiment in 1935 on a tattered farm along the Wisconsin River near Baraboo in Sauk County, which they dubbed “The Shack and Farm.” The shack is a rebuilt chicken coop along that Wisconsin River that once served as a cherished retreat for the Leopold family. The family restored prairies and planted tens of thousands of trees on the property, which is designated as a National Historic Landmark. The landscape surrounding the Leopold Shack and Farm is now known as the Leopold Pines Conservation Area.
In 1949, Oxford University Press published Leopold’s collection of poetic and philosophical essays. A foundational work of conservation literature, A Sand County Almanac has captivated generations of readers with its rich tapestry of history, humor, science and lyrical prose.
The Aldo Leopold Foundation, based in Baraboo, is marking the milestone with the release of a 75th anniversary edition of Leopold’s classic.
“Leopold’s powerful voice continues to guide individuals, helping them reconcile their feelings with current events and inspiring meaningful actions growing from an ethic of care that includes all places and all people,” Huffaker said.
This year also marks another major milestone tied to Leopold.
The Gila Wilderness Area, which totals nearly 600,000 acres, became the world’s first designated wilderness, at Leopold’s urging, 100 years ago upon approval from the U.S. Forest Service. A native of Burlington, Iowa, Leopold first became familiar with the remarkable and rugged lands at the headwaters of the Gila River as a young forester working for the U.S. Forest Service in what today is New Mexico. Physically and biologically diverse, this area had long been valued and held sacred by Indigenous peoples, including the Mogollon and Chiricahua Apache.
Today, the National Wilderness Preservation System protects some of the most biologically diverse and ecologically healthy areas across 806 Wilderness Areas in the United States, totaling over 111 million acres.
“As an organization that’s entrusted with promoting and interpreting the Leopold legacy, this year gives us a moment to pause and reflect on where the conservation movement is coming from, where we’re at and where we’re going,” Huffaker said. “These are significant milestones in that journey.”
Leopold and the Forest Service had the foresight to recognize that wild places weren’t going to remain wild without specific protection and designating the Gila Wilderness Area as the first such area based on its vastness and its biological diversity set a model that has been replicated around the world in providing legal protection for the most special natural areas, Huffaker said.
“That was not only a significant moment in the conservation field history but in Leopold’s own life,” he said. “Having the foresight and working the system to create the policy to protect it was a cornerstone to his own personal journey. When he came back to the Midwest and was working a very different, private and converted landscape he began to explore how important it was to restore land back to health.”
A Sand County Almanac became an important opportunity for Leopold to articulate to a public audience the relationship between humans and the natural world, Huffaker added.
The book leads readers through the diverse landscapes of Leopold’s experience and culminates in the influential essay The Land Ethic, in which he calls for social responsibility toward the natural world. More than 2 million copies of A Sand County Almanac have been sold and the work has been translated into 15 languages.
Leopold spent many years crafting these essays, which inspire readers to understand how the natural world works and to care for all wild things. Informed by his developing philosophies and his family’s effort to transform the landscape surrounding The Shack, the essays make an appeal for moral responsibility to the natural world.
After a series of rejections from various publishers, Oxford University Press finally accepted Leopold’s manuscript in April 1948. Tragically, just one week later, Leopold died of a heart attack at age 61 while fighting a grass fire less than a hundred yards from where the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center stands today.
“The message still holds true, and people still see it as a very contemporary message,” Huffaker said. “It’s just become one of those cornerstone pieces of literature. We have lots of new powerful and important voices but it’s also important to have that historical grounding.”
A Sand County Almanac features an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver that provides a contemporary context of Leopold’s writing and thinking.
“With Leopold, you’re always finding new facets and new meanings in what he left behind and meanwhile the world around that legacy constantly changes, and so we always reveal things that Leopold anticipated as well as understanding things he didn’t fully grasp or couldn’t have fully anticipated, Leopold biographer and foundation fellow Curt Meine said.
“The most significant thing that Leopold left us was that he understood that the work was not finished, that his was only one voice at a particular time and a particular landscape. The idea of continuing to evolve what he called a land ethic is work that goes on every single day and will go on indefinitely. He opened the door to the continuing evolution of how humans relate to the world around us. I’m always most gratified and encouraged when new voices come into the conversation.”
Leopold’s work in Wisconsin came during a crucial period, Meine said.
“When we step back from it all and look back, we see that Leopold came along at a very particular time and place with a very particular set of needs, challenges and opportunities,” he said. “The Northwoods were deforested, prairies were gone, wetlands were drained, pollution was unchecked, wildlife populations were at an all-time low and soil erosion was rampant. There was a litany of environmental needs and challenges. Leopold came along and responded to that with all kinds of innovative contributions in his research and his teachings, writing and philosophy. But he also benefitted from what came before him and the whole tradition of Wisconsin conservation and the progressive response to environmental issues.”
In his wake, Leopold left a set of laws, institutions and literature that has continued to shape environmental conservation efforts in Wisconsin and beyond. Leopold’s efforts included working with Owen Gromme, who spent most of his professional career as curator of birds and mammals at the Milwaukee Public Museum, to influence legislation to protect, herons, hawks and owls.
Leopold is viewed as an environmental visionary whose work has had a lasting effect, much like a pair of other groundbreaking environmentalists with deep ties to the state – John Muir, an early advocate for the preservation of wilderness in the United States, and Gaylord Nelson, the former Wisconsin governor and U.S. Senator who launched the first Earth Day and would later become chairman of the Wilderness Society.
Founded in 1982, the Aldo Leopold Foundation is a conservation organization that works to inspire an ethical relationship between people and nature through its namesake’s legacy. The non-profit entity also manages the Aldo Leopold Shack and Farm and the land that surrounds it. The headquarters is the green-built Leopold Center, designed by The Kubala Washatko Architects of Cedarburg, where educational and land stewardship programs are carried out. The foundation also acts as the executor of Leopold’s literary estate and serves as a clearinghouse for information regarding Leopold, his work and his ideas.
The foundation’s board of directors includes treasurer Gail Hanson, who served as chief financial officer of Milwaukee-based Aurora Health Care (now Advocate Aurora Health) from 2011 until her retirement in 2018, and Steve Bablitch, former Aurora Health Care general counsel. Past board members have included Kimberly Blaeser, professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Carol Skornicka, a one-time executive at Midwest Airlines, an Oak Creek-based carrier that operated from 1984 to 2010.
Estella Leopold, 97, the lone surviving child of Aldo Leopold and his wife, also named Estella, is a founding and lifetime director of the board.
“A richness of the Leopold legacy is that he had this vision that was global and all-encompassing and timeless and yet how do you balance that enormity with the practical realities of living day to day,” Huffaker said. “It’s planting the tree. Planting the prairie. Tangible things that the family was able to do to put his ideas into practice and connect the philosophical and the practical. What we have the great honor and pleasure of continuing today is to keep this land ethic idea alive and evolving.”
The foundation’s work includes owning and managing the farm, which is now part of a 6,000-acre landscape for grassland birds and biodiversity conservation.
“We still maintain the trees the family planted and make sure they are healthy and vigorous, and we also work to help scholars annotate and translate Leopold’s journals and make those available to researchers,” Huffaker said. “We have Leopold Week, where we bring these other voices, contemporary voices, to the table to inform where conservation is at and where’s it’s going. Some of them, by their own admission, work in the shadow of Aldo Leopold. Some have never read Aldo Leopold. But they are writing about the same things, our relationship to the natural world and relationship to each other.”
In a time of constant, quickening and complex change, it’s imperative to view environmental and social change through the same lens, Meine said.
“We, especially our young people, live in a time that the human race has never experienced. They will live to see the consequences and I won’t,” he said. “What that means is the complexity of the discussions are even more intense. This is where Leopold plays a really important role because he’s a historic figure that connects us to the origins of conservation. He gives us a grounding point in finding our way forward in this time of rapid change. Whether it’s climate change, biodiversity, economic instability or issues of social justice, there’s a whole litany of things we face as challenges, especially political division and conflict. Leopold saw land stewardship as an area for collaborative work, for working together across all social places and divisions.”
The Aldo Leopold Foundation will hold Leopold Week March 1-8 with a series of virtual speakers. There is no cost to register or attend. Last year’s program attracted more than 6,000 registered participants from 49 states and 40 countries. To register, go to: www.aldoleopold.org/news-and-events/leopold-week.
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