Aldo Leopold was born in Burlington, Iowa, in 1887. Educated at the Lawrenceville School and Yale University, he joined the United States Forest Service in 1909 as a forest assistant in New Mexico and Arizona. One of the founders of the Wilderness Society, he initiated, in 1924, the first Forest Wilderness Area in the United States (which is now the Gila National Forest). Moving to Madison, Wisconsin, he was Associate Director of the Forest Products Laboratory, as well as consulting forester to several states.

Mr. Leopold founded the profession of game management and wrote the first important book on the subject. In 1933, the University of Wisconsin created a Chair of Game Management for him. He died in 1948, while fighting a brush fire on a neighbor's farm. His death cut short an assignment as an advisor on conservation to the United Nations, and left his book A Sand County Almanac as the last statement of his uncompromising philosophy.