Several related problems have been posed in the ecological literature: optimal age-specific harvesting strategies for a population subject to a variety of ecological constraints, and the so-called problem of optimizing life-history strategies, i.e., what use of energy for reproductive effort and for survivorship effort will maximize the individual''s contribution to population growth over its expected lifetime. The density-independent Leslie model is viewed in the literature as a 1st approximation to the real situation, appropriate perhaps for an expanding population that has not yet approached its resource limitations. This study reviews some of the literature on these subjects and presents several new solutions (or solution techniques) to these problems. Some conclusions on the practicality of the Leslie model for real-life problems are presented.