Aldo Leopold Writing Contest
2025 Leopold Writing ContestESSAY SUBMISSION DEADLINE:
Valentine's Day Friday, February 14th, 2025, at midnight. The Leopold Writing Program invites New Mexico students in grades 6-12 to submit original essays for our 2025 Writing Contest. Please consider the following, and then respond to the ESSAY PROMPT below.
Aldo Leopold is most widely known as the author of A Sand County Almanac (1949) in which he articulates his land ethic: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
Leopold believed our idea of “community” should be enlarged to include non-human elements such as soils, waters, plants, animals.
In his essay “Song of the [Río] Gavilan” in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold writes:
"This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it ... you must know the speech of hills and rivers … Then you may hear it—a vast pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries." Essay PromptWrite about the song or melody that you hear in a body of water (such as a stream, river, lake, acequia, ocean, etc.) and what you would answer back. |
Each year, the Aldo Leopold Writing Contest invites New Mexico students in Grades 6-12 to submit essays in response to a carefully-crafted and thought-provoking prompt inspired by the writings of Aldo Leopold. Encouraged by their teachers, students delve into his philosophies of land stewardship, especially as set forth in A Sand County Almanac, and explore the relevance of Leopold's classic and timeless observations to issues that they experience personally, locally, and globally. Information about the essay topic will be published and distributed in the Fall, with a deadline for submission in the Spring. The Writing Contest is divided into three Categories: Grades 6-7, Grades 8-9, and Grades 10-12. A panel of volunteer judges evaluates each essay in these categories for responsiveness to the prompt, eloquence of expression, writing skill and language usage, and connection to Leopold's "land ethic." Judges choose First Place essayists in each of the three categories, as well as Honorable Mentions as merited. Each student winner receives a cash award and certificate. Since its beginning in 2009, over 3,000 students from schools in rural and urban communities around New Mexico have taken part in the annual Aldo Leopold Writing Contest. The 2025 Writing Contest is in partnership with the Dear Body of Water project. The Leopold Writing Program and Dear Body of Water have developed additional classroom activities students can use to help them come up with ideas for their essay submission. These can be found in the "Additional Resources" section below. |
Additional Resources
This year we are sharing additional writing activities and resources that are meant to help students come up with essay ideas. We are also sharing our essay scoring rubric so students can understand how their essays will be judged.
Click below to access a Dear Body of Water supplementary activity and list of additional resources for teachers and students to help them engage with the writing prompt.
Click below to access a Dear Body of Water supplementary activity and list of additional resources for teachers and students to help them engage with the writing prompt.
General Contest Details
ELIGIBILITY
Open to all students enrolled in grades 6-12 in public, private, and home schools in New Mexico.
Open to all students enrolled in grades 6-12 in public, private, and home schools in New Mexico.
CONTEST PARAMETERS
- Students must submit ORIGINAL work.
- Both student and sponsoring teacher must sign the contest entry form affirming that the essay is original and not assisted by AI software. All essays will be run through AI testing software.
- One essay submission per person.
- Essays must be uploaded as a PDF file.
FORMAT AND AWARDS
ESSAY LENGTH by Category
Grades 6-7: 300-500 word essay
Grades 8-9: 400-600 word essay
Grades 10-12: 500-700 word essay
AWARDS
Cash prizes will be awarded.
One Winner and two Honorable Mentions will be chosen in each grade category.
There are two additional awards:
Grades 6-7: 300-500 word essay
Grades 8-9: 400-600 word essay
Grades 10-12: 500-700 word essay
AWARDS
Cash prizes will be awarded.
One Winner and two Honorable Mentions will be chosen in each grade category.
There are two additional awards:
- The David E. Stuart Humanitarian Award for Special Merit for Best Overall Essay
- The Estella B. Leopold Memorial Award for Creativity
THE ALDO LEOPOLD WRITING CONTEST
For 6th – 12th grade students in New Mexico, the Aldo Leopold Writing Contest is an effective and inclusive way to engage the next generation of citizen leaders in an urgent conversation about how to address the changing realities brought about by climate disruption, biodiversity loss, growing demand for fresh water, and other pressing global conservation issues.
It is effective not only because of how many it touches (the student participants, their schools, and their larger communities), but also because it gives voice to the writers with the most moral authority to discuss these issues: the generation most vulnerable to the consequences of inaction. It is inclusive because the essays are judged anonymously based on the character, relevance, and persuasiveness of the content, without regard to the writer’s race, origin, religion, or other factor. The Aldo Leopold Writing Contest is an organic way to diversify an essential conversation for society because it is expansive, wide-reaching, and merit-based.
