Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) is best known to readers as the author of "A Sand County Almanac," a 1949 bestseller comprised of essays about the area around his home in Wisconsin. It embodies the idea of a "land ethic," the idea that people should have a responsible relationship to the ecology of the place they live.

    The book was published after his death, and reflects a long romance between Leopold and nature. An avid woodsman and birder as a boy, he studied in one of America's first forestry programs at Yale University. From there he went into the U.S. Forest Service, stationed in 1909 in Arizona and New Mexico territories (not yet states). He developed a land management plan for the Grand Canyon, and proposed the establishment of the Forest Service's first national wilderness area.

    After transferring to a Forest Service laboratory in Wisconsin, he took up a post as the first-ever professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It was from here that he purchased the barren, over-used land in central Wisconsin where he began to apply what he had learned--and formed the focus of his greatest book.

    His writing, of course, is filled with statements of his "land ethic." For example: We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

    But it is also filled with lyric passages of an almost spiritual nature. Here, describing a gathering of cranes for their morning feeding, he writes: "On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh."

    He was one of the founders of the Wilderness Society, back in 1935. A further legacy is his children, all five of whom took up environmental or related fields, such as hydrology and botany.

    Aldo Leopold died of a heart attack while helping a neighbor extinguish a wildfire on his property.

    Vocabulary: Which word above means:

    1. unproductive, not fruitful

    2. assigned (to)

    3. a set of moral principles

    4. the study of water on earth and in the atmosphere

    5. a place without people and cities (Leopold called it "a blank place on the map")

    6. gives physical form to

    7. put out (as a fire)

    8. made (of)

    9. poetic, beautifully expressed

    10. management of forests

    ANSWERS: 1. barren 2. stationed (in) 3. ethic 4. hydrology 5. wilderness 6. embodies 7. extinguish 8. comprised (of) 9. lyric 10. forestry