Aldo Leopold

1
Aldo Leopold

• The father of wildlife management.
• One of the first conservationists to recognize
  the importance of protecting nongame species.

2
Author

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

3
Leopolds 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

4
Leopold in Arizona Territory
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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

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Leopold experienced predator control first hand
at the Office of Grazing in Albuquerque
7
Commercial Hunters in the Southwest
8
Leopold Defined Game Management

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

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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

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

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Leopold Leaves The Southwest

• Associate director of the Forest Services
  product laboratory in Madison, WI- 1924

12

• Consulting for Sporting Arms and Munitions
  Manufacturers- 1928
• National game surveys and research.

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The Professor

• Joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin
  1933

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• valuable lessons about people and their
  relationship with the land

15

• 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

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• 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

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Leopolds 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.

18
Leopold died in 1948, while fighting a brush fire
on a neighbors farm.
19
Leopold would have been appointed to the position
of advisor on conservation for the United Nations.