Aldo Leopold
Receiving the John Burroughs Medal marked one of the clearest moments of recognition in Aldo Leopold's career as a writer and naturalist.
Leopold was born on January 11, 1887, in Burlington and attended Burlington High School and the Lawrenceville School before going on to Yale University, where he studied at the Sheffield Scientific School and the Yale School of the Environment. He worked across several overlapping roles throughout his life — as a forester, ecologist, naturalist, conservationist, environmentalist, philosopher, botanical collector, and hunter. He also taught at the University of Wisconsin, bringing together his practical fieldwork and his writing in English. His essay "Thinking Like a Mountain" was among the pieces he produced, and he wrote the book A Sand County Almanac. He was associated with The Wilderness Society during his career as well.
Leopold died in 1948 in Baraboo. A Sand County Almanac, which he wrote before his death, stands as the most concrete marker of his output as a writer working across the fields of ecology, natural history, and philosophy. The John Burroughs Medal he received during his lifetime recognized his contributions in those areas, and A Sand County Almanac has continued to carry his name as a forester, ecologist, and conservationist who was born in Burlington and educated at Yale.
Quotes by Aldo Leopold
Aldo Leopold's insights on:
Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven one may never get there.
The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry. The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playing swirls, and the wind hurries on... A tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind.
To the mouse, snow means freedom from want and fear. ... To a rough-legged hawk, a thaw means freedom from want and fear.
Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals.
No hobby should either seek or need rational justification. To wish to do it is reason enough. To find reasons why it is useful or beneficial converts it at once from an avocation into an industry.
In June, as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.
If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them.
A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct.