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Aldo Leopold: Pioneer Conservationist
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11798 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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4 / 1987 |
5,333 Words |
| Author
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Susan Flader
Susan Flader is professor of history at the University of
Missouri-Columbia and author of a biography on Aldo
Leopold entitled thinking Like A Mountain. |
Aldo Leopold is best known as the author of A Sand County Almanac, a volume of nature sketches and philosophical essays recognized as one of the enduring expressions of an ecological and ethical attitude toward people and land. To many who know him through these essays, he is akin to Thoreau because of his keen observation, his philosophic penetration, and his clarity of expression.
Yet he was also an internationally respected scientist and conservationist, instrumental in formulating policy and building ecological foundations for two new professions in twentieth-century America, forestry and wildlife management. Through all his efforts he was dedicated to the conviction that we would never solve our conservation problems on a meaningful scale until we as a people had attained an ecological attitude toward our environment. This attitude would be the basis for what he termed a "land ethic." As 1987 marks the centennial of his birth, it is fitting to reflect on how far we have come in realizing Leopold's desire of approaching conservation problems through the awakening of an ecological conscience.
Early years
Aldo Leopold was born on January 11, 1887, in Burlington, Iowa. That river city was a thriving commercial center of about 20,000 on the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad (CB&Q). Here lumber rafted from the Wisconsin pineries was transferred to railroad cars to be transformed into houses and barns on the treeless plains. Aldo Leopold's father, son of a minor German aristocrat who came adventuring to the New World in the 1830s, started to work out on the plains, selling barbed wire and roller skates to farmers in Kansas and
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