Aldo Leopold

 (1887-1948) earned many accolades throughout his life. He helped establish the first wilderness area in the U.S., served as director of the Audubon Society, and co-founded the Wilderness Society. In his posthumous work, 1949’s A Sand County Almanac, Leopold urged humans to adopt a new relationship with the wilderness he called “land ethic,” in which people become invested stewards of the land they inhabit. Today, the book is regarded as one of the igniting sparks of the environmentalism movement in the U.S.