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The year was 1937, and the elite Huron Mountain Club was concerned about declining wildlife in its 15,000acre old-growth forest bordering Lake Michigan. It sought the help of a fifty-year-old professor of game management at die University of Wisconsin named Aldo Leopold.
Leopold's Report on Huron Mountain Club (1938) remains unpublished but can be found in the University of Wisconsin's online Leopold archive. Beyond occupying a landmark place in resource management history, it resonates more broadly even today as an instructive example of innovative thinking and a call to citizen initiative, coalition-building, and factgrounded environmental advocacy.
The problem at the Club, Leopold saw, was that dense climax stands of maple and hemlock had shaded out sunlight for food plants, wildflowers, and songbirds. But even this outwardly "virgin" wilderness had already been altered by...