“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.”

So begins the Foreword of “A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, which he dated as March 4, 1948. Six weeks later, Leopold, one of the most influential natural conservationists of the 20th century, passed away.

Leopold’s legacy spans the disciplines of forestry, wildlife management, conservation biology, sustainable agriculture, restoration ecology, private land management, environmental history, literature, education, esthetics, and ethics.

Through a grant from the NHPRC, the Aldo Leopold Foundation contracted with the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center (UWDCC) to digitize the Leopold papers. The Leopold Collection (http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/AldoLeopold/project) houses the raw materials that document not only Leopold’s rise to prominence but the history of conservation and the emergence of the field of ecology from the early 1900s until the middle of the 20th century.

– Courtesy of the  National Historical Publications and Records Commission

For more background on this particular project, see this 2007 news article.

The digital collections themselves may be searched here.