ABSTRACT
Aldo Leopold was born in Burlington, Iowa, in 1887, the eldest of Carl and Clara's four children, an American family of German ancestry. Leopold dedicated his first published book, Game Management, to his father, 'a pioneer in sportsmanship'. Leopold was an innovator and a visionary. He was indeed a founder of a number of environmental fields. He was a founder of game management, which became wildlife management in his own lifetime, then wildlife ecology, and finally now conservation biology. Leopold was a founder of the North American Wilderness Movement. In the 1920s he argued passionately and voluminously for a system of wilderness reserves in the national forests, primarily for purposes of primitive and virile kinds of recreation. Leopold was a founder of ecosystem-management forestry, to which the US Forest Service has been converting since 1992. Leopold situated his proposed land ethic in the broader evolutionary-ecological worldview that he gradually exposed and inculcated in the preceding essays of the Almanac.
