Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

Iowa State students practice Leopold's land ethic

Back to Leopold Letter Summer 2012

On a chilly, rainy weekend in April, Iowa State students gathered around the fireplace at Aldo Leopold’s Shack and read out loud from A Sand County Almanac, in the same spot where the author “lay a split of good oak on the andirons” more than 60 years before.  

The pilgrimage to Leopold’s famous woodlands on the banks of the Wisconsin River was the grand finale to a Spring 2012 seminar called “Learning to Love Our Land – Lessons from Leopold.” Lisa Schulte-Moore, professor in ISU’s Natural Resource Ecology and Management department and frequent collaborator on Leopold Center projects, taught the two-credit seminar.

Graduate and undergraduate students in disciplines ranging from fisheries to forestry to landscape architecture met weekly to read and discuss essays from A Sand County Almanac and The River of the Mother of God. They also read the writings of two influential thinkers who preceded Leopold, John Muir and Gifford Pinchot, and responded with essays of their own.

Discussion centered on the complexities of watershed management, predator-prey relationships, sustainable agriculture and education. When the weather warmed up, students took to the outdoors to put Leopold’s land ethic into practice. They helped restore native prairies at Peterson Park and Ames High School, cut invasive honeysuckle from the Christianson Forest Preserve, and took a tour of TableTop Farm, an organic vegetable farm near Nevada.

The class culminated in the trip to Wisconsin, where students toured the headquarters of the Aldo Leopold Foundation (which has the highest LEED rating for sustainability in the nation), visited the Shack, and stopped by the International Crane Foundation to see the protection of endangered species in action.

Back to Leopold Letter Summer 2012