An author, philosopher, conservationist, and environmentalist, Aldo Leopold is known for being very influential in the development of current environmental ethics. Throughout the early 1900s, Leopold worked in the United States Forest Service at a variety of national forests throughout the west coast, convincing the Forest Service to protect 500,000 acres of the New Mexico Gila National Forest. In 1923, he was elected a member of the wildlife conservation nonprofit Boone and Crockett Club. Leopold eventually became a professor in 1933 at the University of Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, he purchased a farm near the river with his family where they planted thousands of trees.

Leopold’s legacy lived on after his death when his son published a collection of essays he wrote about his home in Sauk County, Wisconsin called A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There. Selling over two million copies and now translated in fourteen different languages, this book coined the term “land ethic” and simulated a widespread interest in environmentalism ecology as a science that explores the relationship between people and the land they inhabit.