Aldo Leopold,
“The Oldest Task in Human History”

Stan Temple, Professor Emeritus of Conservation, U. of Wisconsin, Madison, Science Advisor to the Aldo Leopold Foundation Board

Wednesday, October 14 at 7:00 pm
Register for Zoom Presentation

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Dr. Stan Temple

Dr. Stan Temple is the Beers-Bascom Professor Emeritus in Conservation in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For 32 years he held the academic position once occupied by Aldo Leopold, and during that time he won every teaching award for which he was eligible. Temple and his students have helped save many of the world’s endangered species and the habitats on which they depend. Stan is currently a Senior Fellow with the Aldo Leopold Foundation, where he leads crane tours and introduces Future Leaders Fellows to Leopold's history, phenology, and wildlife ecology. He has also been a core contributor to the yearly Wisconsin Phenology Calendar and has received conservation awards from the Society for Conservation Biology, The Wildlife Society, and Wisconsin Society for Ornithology. Stan is a Fellow of the American Ornithologists' Union, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. He has been President of the Society for Conservation Biology and Chairman of the Board of The Nature Conservancy in Wisconsin and was inducted into the Wisconsin Conservation Hall of Fame in 2020.

Aldo Leopold identified “the oldest task in human history” as how “to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.” For owners of private land Leopold knew there are many obstacles, among them: Maximizing economic returns from one’s land, exercising the privilege to do whatever one wants with private property, feeling no obligation to act in the public’s interest, suffering no consequences for abusing land, and simply being ignorant and unaware of how one’s activities affect land. Leopold struggled throughout his career with how to overcome such obstacles. What would it take to induce land owners to practice conservation in the face of inclinations to do otherwise? He observed: “We seem ultimately always thrown back on individual ethics as the basis of land conservation. It is hard to make a man, by pressure of law or money, do a thing which does not spring naturally from his own personal sense of right and wrong.” This line of thinking ultimately led Leopold to his most enduring contribution: his land ethic. Professor Stan Temple will discuss the evolution of Leopold’s land ethic and why it remains so relevant to the challenge of living on Planet earth without spoiling it.