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Introduction to the Aldo Leopold Foundation
- 2. Growth of a Classic
- 3. Family Roots
- 6. What We Do
- 7. What We Do
- 8. What We Do
- 9. What We Do
Hinweis der Redaktion
- So really, our story begins here, because there would certainly be no Aldo Leopold Foundation without the amazing writing in A Sand County Almanac. I’m sure many of you have read this book more than once. The Almanac was published in 1949 and has since sold sold 2.5 million copies and been printed in 12 different languages. Just to give you a point of reference, let me share a graphic to give you a sense of the rise in interest in Leopold’s ideas. This was published in our newsletter several years back along with an article by Carl Leopold, Aldo’s youngest son and a well-known botanist. Here, Carl very humbly compares the citations of his very popular textbook book Plant Growth and Development to the citations of his father’s book. So when Carl’s book came out in 1964, A Sand County Almanac really hadn’t taken off yet even though it had come out almost twenty years earlier. Not long after our nation’s first Earth Day in 1970, a mass market paperback edition of A Sand County Almanac came out, and it was then that it really took off, and as you can see the interest in Leopold has just continued to grow over time.
- And it was in response to that growing interest that the children of Aldo Leopold formed the Aldo Leopold Foundation in 1982. I wish I had more time today to tell you about the Leopold siblings, because they really are an incredible part of Aldo Leopold’s story. Each of them went on to become respected conservationists in their own right. If you’re interested in learning more, later on I’ll give you the link to our YouTube channel where you can watch a collection of DVD extras from our Green Fire film, and there’s a great one that profiles all of the accomplishments of the Leopold siblings you can check out if you’re interested. As the book started to take off in popularity, the family was beginning to realize that the Leopold Shack would be a focal point for their father’s legacy for generations to come, and that sharing the ideas in A Sand County Almanac would only become more critical over time. So, they formed a small family trust which later grew to become the more formaly 501(c)3 non profit organization that we know today. The first staff weren’t hired until the mid ‘90s, but prior to that Nina Leopold Bradley (on the far left), along with her husband Charlie, were our first full-time volunteers, taking up the tasks of caring for and studying the land around the Shack property and teaching others in that landscape.
- Our visitation is about 6,000 people annually, and they take part in everything from exhibits to guided tours, to workshops and special events that take place throughout the year. About a third of our 9 full time staff work on Education and Outreach programs, and another third are out on the ground doing active land management work.
- Our land stewardship crew is supported by a handful of seasonal interns that work anywhere between 3 and 9 months with us doing invasive species control, landowner education, and really fun stuff like prairie burning. The other third of our full time staff does administrative work like membership and fundraising.
- The Aldo Leopold Foundation also manages the Leopold archives, which is a vast collection of images, artifacts, and original writings from Leopold’s personal collection. The majority of the archive is physically housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but we’ve recently digitized the entire collection to make it available online to scholars around the world.
- We also reach out beyond the borders of Wisconsin with a wide variety of print and online publications and outreach educational materials. We do a free monthly e-newsletter that you can sign up for on the website, and we also publish a bi-annual magazine called the Leopold Outlook that is one of the benefits we share with our members.
- Increasingly we’re finding that the way we’re able to advance our mission as an organization is to work through other people. Land Ethic Leaders engages 20-30 participants for two and a half days with a mix of activities designed to help them explore and understand their own land ethic better, and also to pick up skills and tools to help share that with other people. What’s fairly unique about this program is that the activities are largely planned and facilitated by members of the group, and there is very little use of Powerpoint– it’s mostly face to face discussions and interactions with other participants. We structured the program this way intentionally, with the idea that A Sand County Almanac, and the land ethic itself, are really all about values. And values are pretty complex, layered things- in fact, sometimes it’s hard for us to reconcile our own actions with our values, let alone accept when the actions of others don’t quite line up with what we think they should do. Leopold realized this complexity, and saw the need for us as a society to be continually talking about and shaping the evolution of our values together. Near the end of the Land Ethic essay Leopold has a line that says that “nothing so important as an ethic is ever written… it evolves in the minds of a thinking community.” So to follow Leopold’s lead, it really felt like rather than create your typical workshop where the “expert” instructors get up and preach from the PowerPoint pulpit for hours on end, we wanted to create a forum where we could make people feel comfortable sitting down and actually talking about the meaning and value of conservation work as a thinking community together. So as we were shaping this program what we wanted to create was to not only give people that space to explore, but also to equip people with facilitation skills and tools for going back and engaging with their “thinking communities” back home, engaging people in discussions rather than arguments. And particularly in today’s charged political climate, I’m sure you’ll agree this couldn’t be a more critical skill, not just for building a land ethic but in general.