Neptune's Needle

Conservationist and author. His father and mother nurtured his early interest in the outdoors and in conservation and supported him in his decision to enter the emerging field of forestry.

Following graduation, Leopold accepted a Forest Service appointment to the Apache National Forest in the Arizona Territory, one of the many national forests established during the administration of Theodore Roosevelt.

Leopold spent fifteen years in a series of field and administrative positions in the American Southwest. During these years he became a pioneering figure in many aspects of conservation science, policy, and administration, including forest and range management, soil conservation, recreation, and wildlife management. In the early 1920s he began to act on his growing concern over the loss of wilderness lands in the national forests.

In 1924 Leopold became assistant director of the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, the main research facility of the Forest Service. Although confined by the demands of the position, Leopold devoted much of his extracurricular time to two of his primary interests; wilderness protection and game management. By the mid-1920s he was a leading spokesman in the movement for wilderness protection, and he provoked the Forest Service to assume a more active role in the systematic appraisal and reservation of the remnants of wilderness within the national forests.

As a teacher, researcher, and writer, and as a policymaker in a wide variety of government agencies and conservation organizations, Leopold through the remainder of the 1930s and the 1940s continued to explore the ecological foundations of conservation, to communicate his findings, to train students in the land management professions, and to alter policy to reflect the new scientific understanding and philosophical approach.

Leopold detailed the progress of his thinking in an outpouring of professional publications. During World War II, however, he began to produce more of the literary essays that he had only occasionally published before. Eventually gathered and published posthumously as A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There in 1949, these essays drew on the combined elements of traditional natural history, modern ecology, personal narrative, and conservation philosophy. Leopold's wry style, light touch, pervasive sense of history, scientific expertise, and unusual literary skill would make A Sand County Almanac one of the critical sourcebooks of the modern environmental movement. Its capstone essay, "The Land Ethic," became an important early expression of the philosophy underlying that continuing movement.

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Compiler

Peter Richards