Aldo Leopold Rock

This stone honors Aldo Leopold, the man many call the father of wildlife conservation. He was born in Burlington, Iowa, in eighteen eighty-seven, and grew up watching the marshes and bluffs along the Mississippi River. That boyhood shaped a lifetime. Leopold worked for the United States Forest Service, wrote the first textbook in the field of wildlife management, and in nineteen thirty-three accepted the nation's first professorship in game management at the University of Wisconsin.

But his lasting gift was an idea. In a book called A Sand County Almanac, published in nineteen forty-nine, just after he died fighting a grass fire, Leopold laid out what he called the land ethic. It asked people to see soil, water, plants, and animals not as property to be used up, but as a community to which we belong. That single idea still guides conservation today.