Aldo Leopold

(1887 - 1948)

Aldo Leopold took a post in the new U.S. Forest Service in the Arizona Territory in 1909. He spent fifteen years in the Southwest—owing to his efforts, the Gila Wilderness Area was designated in New Mexico in 1924—before moving to Wisconsin, where he wrote in 1945, “I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?” He died of a heart attack while fighting a grass fire in 1948.