Calendar

Dec.15:
Deadline for Land Stewardship Intern application

Jan. 17:
Wildlife Management for your Woodland

Jan. 24:
Winter Sleuths

Feb. 13-14:
Leopold Southwest Conference

The Woodland School

Woodland School classes make great holiday gifts! Give a friend or loved one a chance to learn a new skill to take care of the land in the new year. Choose from chainsaw safety, prescribed fire, birding, and more. Register online today for any of our classes!

Give a Gift Membership!

Introduce a friend to the work of the foundation and become a key partner in helping us spread the land ethic, advance the science of land health, preserve the Leopold shack and farm, and train new leaders for the future of conservation. They will receive our bi-annual magazine, The Leopold Outlook. Give the gift of membership today!

Go Shopping in Our Bookstore

Looking for something you can wrap? Check out our bookstore for an array of gifts for the Leopold fan in your life. Want a very special holiday gift that can become an heirloom in your family? Give a Pines Edition A Sand County Almanac this year (with free shipping during the holiday season).

As the Year Ends, Invest in the Work of the Foundation for the Future

"Our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. -Aldo Leopold, Foreword to A Sand County Almanac (1949)

The turbulence of this past year has painfully brought into focus one of the most profound aspects of Leopold’s land ethic: that material wealth will always be ephemeral when not connected to the land community, undergirded by an ethic that acknowledges, accepts, admires, and respects this true fountain of wealth. Leopold even went so far as to question the need for a "little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings."

It is with a humble sense of irony that we now call on your generosity of spirit to invest some of your "material blessings" in the work of the Aldo Leopold Foundation. We need your help to continue to build the requisite intellectual framework, skill set, and emotional support network necessary to retain and restore our nation’s capacity for true ecological, social, and economic health.

As we approach a new year, we have stepped back to think anew about where the world is heading and what we can uniquely offer to strengthen the rising interest in sustainability. We have defined four strategic areas that build upon our past accomplishments: Catalyzing a Land Ethic, Advancing Land Health, Cultivating Leadership for Conservation, and Building Organizational Capacity. Success in each of these areas will garner more widespread support for Leopold’s values and vision and fundamentally reshape our future.

Leopold understood that a change in values and viewpoints was not a quick and easy venture; rather it is a long and difficult process that requires equal parts of patience, persistence, skill, and foresight. As we confront economic uncertainty, global climate change, and unparalleled extinction of species, now is the time to redouble our individual and collective efforts to weave a land ethic into our society as a solution to the problems that threaten the health and well-being of present and future generations.

We invite you to join us for the first time or renew your membership today!.

Warmest regards,

Bob Lange
Development Director

The Winter Outlook is Here!

Last month, you chose your favorite image to be on the cover of the Winter 2008 issue of The Leopold Outlook. The winner was "Rainbow over the Kaibab Plateau" by Joe Trudeau of Hancock, New Hampshire. The magazine will be arriving in members' mailboxes in just a few days, but in the meantime you can read some of the articles on our website. The issue focuses on Leopold's time in the Southwest in commemoration of the centennial of his arrival in Arizona in 1909. If you wish to submit photos for consideration for use in the Summer 2009 Outlook, please email them to jeannine@aldoleopold.org.

Leopold's Library Gets a New Home

Last month Stan Temple and staff moved Aldo Leopold's personal library from the University of Wisconsin's Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology to a new home in the Library and Archives of the Leopold Center. Many of the thousands of reprints of published articles in Leopold's collection include hand-written personal messages from the authors, and Leopold added many hand-written marginal notes on points that particularly interested him. At the same time, we also moved the large collection of glass lantern slides that Leopold used to illustrate his classroom and public lectures. It includes what is almost certainly the last slide show Leopold gave, still in the bulky carrying case he used to transport the heavy slides to lecture sites. That lecture featured images of winter tracks of Wisconsin animals. These two collections provide remarkable insights into the literature and images that Aldo Leopold considered important enough to collect. We are grateful to the University of Wisconsin for placing these historical resources in our care.

Join us for a Cultural Conversation in the Southwest!

As the opening event in the Aldo Leopold Centennial Celebration 2009, the conference "A Cultural Conversation: Aldo Leopold, the Southwest, and the Evolution of a Land Ethic for the Future" will be held in Albuquerque on February 13-14, 2009. The year marks the centennial of Leopold's arrival in the Southwest, and the conference will be a creative discussion about the Southwestern roots of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, the roots of environmental ethics in Hispanic and Native American traditions, and the connections among them. Come join us in the conversation as we welcome participants from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds and perspectives.

Become a Part of Aldo Leopold Weekend 2009

Aldo Leopold Weekend is an annual community-based event sponsored by the Aldo Leopold Foundation in towns all over the country. In Wisconsin, celebrations are held on the first weekend of March, to mark the anniversary of the writing of “Foreword” in A Sand County Almanac. Other states like Iowa, Arkansas, and New Mexico have also planned celebrations at different times throughout the year. Ohio even had an entire year of Aldo Leopold Weekend events, one every month between March 2007 and March of 2008. Planning for 2009 Aldo Leopold Weekend events is happening now! Check out last year’s listings to see if there is an event in your community you can plan to attend or help with, or check out our event planning resources and join our team of leaders that organize new events nationwide.

Notes from the Field

We'd like to thank our outgoing interns, Derek Schook and Mark Witecha, for nine months of hard work and wish them luck as they move on to new pursuits! We are now accepting applications for two new Land Stewardship Interns for 2009. Working side-by-side with experienced ALF staff, interns will assist with or lead management activities on the 2,000 acre Leopold Memorial Reserve (LMR). In addition to the famous Shack, the reserve includes habitat from restored and remnant prairies to floodplain forests.  This diverse landscape provides opportunities to learn native plant communities, identify threats to native ecosystems, and the effective tools and methods for management. Applications due by December 15, 2008.