When the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service needed a special place in which to convene hundreds of wildlife management experts for a visioning conference, Madison, WI, proved to be an ideal location. The 1200 professional and citizen conservationists who attended the agency's Conserving the Future conference in July 2011, were surrounded by reminders of their mission.
Near the top of the list of attractions that brought the Conserving the Future participants to Madison would be the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center, where the meetings and workshops took place. Monona Terrace is located downtown, on the shore of Lake Monona and adjacent to the University of Wisconsin, where the academic study of wildlife management began. It is the first convention center in the U.S. to earn silver level certification under the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Existing Buildings.
Another top attraction for conservationists would be the city's proximity to two large and beautiful wildlife refuges - Necedah NWR and Horicon NWR. These side trip destinations provided perfect reminders of the mission conference participants were charged with: mapping out a new vision for the entire U.S. National Wildlife Refuge System.
But the most unique and distinctive feature Madison offered the conference attendees, might just be the numerous strong ties which the area maintains to conservation icon Aldo Leopold. Jeff Holcomb, with the Greater Madison Convention & Visitors Bureau, confirmed this.
"We absolutely highlighted the Aldo Leopold influence," Holcomb said. "I believe that our strong environmental legacy from pioneers such as Leopold and John Muir, and our continued leadership role in the environmental movement, helped bring this important conference to Madison."
The Aldo Leopold Legacy
Leopold was an accomplished, but still relatively young employee of the U.S. Forest Service when a transfer from his duties in the American Southwest to a new assignment in Wisconsin, in 1924, turned him from a skilled practitioner of wildlife management into a serious philosopher/investigator of ecology and conservation. Wisconsin would give Leopold the opportunity to achieve a number of "firsts," that would build his legacy.
With his wife, and their five children, Leopold engaged in one of the first documented back-to-the-land experiments. Although their home was in Madison, they spent countless hours together on a worn-out dust bowl era farm near Baraboo, restoring the life and native prairie vegetation that had been stripped from it.
In 1933, Leopold published the first textbook in the field of wildlife management. The same year, he became the chair of game management at the University of Wisconsin - the first such academic program in the nation.
But his life's masterpiece has proven to be a series of essays geared for a general audience, rather than an academic one. These essays, published as A Sand County Almanac in 1949, a year after his death, focus on humanity's relationship to the natural world; they are considered to be some of the most influential environmental writing ever published.
A Legacy that Continues to Inspire & Inform Conservation Today
If the state of Wisconsin has earned a reputation for Earth-friendly tourism in recent years - its capitol, in particular, earning "a number of rankings as one of the nation's greenest cities," according to Kelly Crumrin, writing for Meeting Focus magazines in late 2009 – it is no stretch to claim that the spirit of Leopold remains alive and active on land he helped transform.
A half-hour north of Madison, Leopold's family land, and "the shack" there, where he often did his
thinking and writing, remains a mecca for contemporary conservationists. Nearby, in Baraboo, the new Leopold Center, constructed of pines planted by the family in the 1930s and '40s and employing many green building techniques and technologies, opened in 2007.
It serves as the headquarters of the Aldo Leopold Foundation which is the primary advocate and interpreter of the Leopold legacy. It does this through a myriad of courses, workshops, and programs.
Conserving the Future and Leopold
The spirit of Leopold was especially in evidence at the Conserving the Future conference, July 11-14, 2011. His name and ideas were invoked repeatedly throughout the four days of the conference. Scheduled events for the hundreds attending began and ended with optional field trips to Leopold's "shack" and the Foundation.
Participants were addressed by the Foundation director Buddy Huffaker and also Leopold biographer Curt Meine. They also viewed a screening of a new documentary, Green Fire, which explores the impact of Leopold's thinking on conservation movements everywhere. The film is premiering throughout 2011 at numerous theatres, national parks and community centers.
One of the three priorities identified at the conference closing session involves connecting America's wildlife refuges more closely to their local communities. It's a goal that would seem to fit well with the spirit of Aldo Leopold.
Kathlin F. Sickel - Reading and writing in print and online. So much to uncover and report. Join me; let's see what we can discover.
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