From Game Management To A Sand County Almanac:A Chronological Approach To The Ideology Of Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold has gained wide recognition as a forerunner of the contemporary environmental movement in America and meantime, he was considered as the father of national wilderness system, wildlife management and the founder of the science of ecological restoration. Much of this is due to his thoughts of the land ethic derived from his book A Sand County Almanac, a collection of essays written mostly in a deeply personal and lyrical style. Leopold was a prolific writer with a broad range of interests in wildlife management, wilderness conservation, and policy-making which undoubtedly established his reputation in environmental conservation in the U.S. However, it was essentially A Sand County Almanac that turned him into a figure with great popularity around the globe. It is well-known that A Sand County Almanac is the culmination of Leopold’s lifetime endeavor in defense of conservationism. Notwithstanding the significance of the land ethic imposing to wilderness conservation, Leopold’s earlier opus entitled Game Management serving as the embodiment of environmentalism could never be underestimated and it is still counted as the very key to his ideological formations of the land ethic nowadays..This research will review the stages in Leopold’s thinking in a chronological way and conduct respective theoretical analyses on Game Management and A Sand County Almanac. And it will also discuss the evolution of Leopold’s ideologies from environmentalism to conservationism so as to reveal Leopold’s ecological contributions in the larger context of history and culture. In this way, the evolution of his thoughts and the significance of his ideas nowadays could be ferreted out.