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An ever-expanding collection of stories that span the range of my career, both in subject matter and in time: Short and funny pieces from the award-winning webzine Grist. Back when the Internet was just picking up steam, I was working at The Progressive. Editor Erwin Knoll asked me to look into privacy concerns with the nascent technology. Published in December 1994, this is practically prehistoric in Internet years. Jane Goodall enthralled the world with her discoveries of primitive toolmaking, cooperative hunting, even rudimentary warfare among chimpanzees. But what if Goodall had ventured into Congo to see the bonobos instead of Tanzania? Handed a different mirror, would we have seen different things in ourselves and reached a different evolutionary understanding of who we are? (Milwaukee Magazine, March 1996) An interview with the Great Plains sustainability guru at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. (The Progressive, September 1996) Deer are beautiful and powerful and, whether you like it or not, they remain essentially in charge of much of our landscape. (Milwaukee Magazine, November, 1998) Have you got your piece of the North Woods yet? (Milwaukee Magazine, August, 1999) Tim Allen, maverick UW botanist, has a bone to pick with fellow ecologists. "The last 30 years, ecology has been on this mechanistic binge," says Allen. "The trouble is they're doing the experiments before the system has been adequately described." The result: "The drunk under the lamppost is looking for his keys, right? He dropped them down the street, where it's hard to find them, but he's looking under the lamppost because that's where it is easy to look." (Isthmus, November 1, 2002) Mike Dombeck: Bringing It All Back Home On the day before the world changed—September 10, 2001—I go fishing and talk conservation with Mike Dombeck, head of the US Forest Service in the Clinton Era. (Wisconsin Academy Review, Winter 2002) Conservation would be nowhere without the hundreds of men and women like George Becker who toil in relative obscurity to produce the detailed knowledge that is the backbone of how we understand the world around us. "We'd stand at the bridge for a few minutes and look upstream and downstream and come to grips in our minds with what we thought would be there," says Dale Becker about working the fish survey with his father. "He had such a sensitivity that way. He could read an environment and list 10, 15 species that were absolutes, and maybe a couple that would be real corkers to find." (Wisconsin Academy Review, Winter 2002) "I've always loved snorkeling in patches of underwater plants," says aquatic ecologist and invasive species expert David Lodge. "It's sort of the aquatic equivalent of a walk in the rainforest. That's where the biological action is in lakes. The rusty crayfish clearcut that underwater forest, which has an immediate effect on one of the things that people value about lakes." (Notre Dame Alumni Magazine, Winter 2004) One of the enduring rites of spring in America is the mass, rolling start of booted pilgrims on the Appalachian Trail. Every year several thousand hikers from all walks of life strap on oversized backpacks, kiss their loved ones, and set out to traverse what they hope will be the entire 2, 173-mile-long route between Georgia and Maine. This eclectic pedestrian army trods but a portion of the broader vision of Benton MacKaye—conservationist, regional planner, and father of the Appalachian Trail, which became the inspiration for greenways all over the country. MacKaye advocated a less invasive interstate highway system, cofounded the Wilderness Society, and wrote the first diagnosis of and argument against urban sprawl. (Preservation, July|August 2003) It was January 1935 when Aldo Leopold first visited the washed up environs of the Shack. It was a bootlegger's farm, an outlaw fact that may have contributed to the burned-out farmhouse. The only structure standing was a chicken coop—now the only chicken coop on the National Register of Historic Places. For instead of calling out architects and builders, the Leopold family put down $8 an acre and turned that coop and its surroundings into a focal point of their family life, into the Shack, and finally into A Sand County Almanac. (Wisconsin Trails, March|April 2003) Wisconsin has spent the last 50 years cashing in on its reputation as a wilderness escape. It's time to create some last bastion of wild silence from the ragged patchwork that remains. The task is daunting, but it will not get any easier. Michigan has Sylvania and yet wild stretches of the Upper Peninsula. Minnesota has its Boundary Waters. We need to hear a wild heart beating in our own north. (Wisconsin Trails, May|June 2004) Since the beginning of the last century we’ve known that mixing lead and children is a developmental disaster. So why are children still bearing such a heavy burden? (Rethinking Schools, Winter, 2004)
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