On January 11, 1887, Rand Aldo Leopold was born to Carl Leopold and Clara Stacker. He grew up in Burlington, Iowa, close to the Mississippi River, with three younger siblings. From young, Leopold showed a keen interest in nature, venturing out into the more or less wild areas around the family mansion in order to observe the behavior of the native wildlife. His father, who often brought his eldest child out to explore the marshland near their home, nurtured this appreciation of the natural world. Leopold also started writing about nature when he was a boy, penning and sketching his adventures with nature in his journals.

In 1912, Leopold married Estella Bergere, and had five children: Starker, Luna, Nina, Carl, and Estella. The family later bought a farm along the Wisconsin River in 1935, in an area outside Baraboo, which was known as the sand counties. By then, Leopold firmly believed that people needed to live close to the land in order to appreciate it more than as a mere resource, and so put this belief into practice in his new farm. It was here that many of the essays and sketches in A Sand County Almanac were set; “the Shack”, which Leopold refers to in the book, for example, is a weekend home that the family built out of an old chicken coop. The Leopold family took upon themselves to restore the land around the Shack by planting pine trees every spring. Close to 50, 000 trees were planted; most of them did not survive a series of droughts in the early years, but the land was eventually restored, although Leopold did not live long to see it.

Aldo Leopold died on April 21, 1948, from a heart attack while fighting a brush fire on a neighboring farm. The fire had spun out of control and had spread to the Leopold land. Luna, his son, published A Sand County Almanac a year later.

[Image courtesy of FIRExNECK @ Wikimedia Commons]