Observation from a Wisconsin Prairie''

These short stories and essays are the reflections of one who has been caught up in restoring those natural things that society has written off as insignificant I began writing then this book as a message to my two small children and upon their maturity I would give Then as I continued to write my purpose took on a different meaning What had begun as a sort of therapeutic remedy for me to cope with the destruction of the Wisconsin landscape and to rebel against the sheer lack of our culture to understand how to live in harmony with our home I m afraid the basic ecological principles laid down by my fellow Wisconsinites Muir and Leopold are written off as nostalgia or impossibilities Unfortunately we have made little progress and are still aliens in this place we call America We continue to treat land as something to abuse and take what we can as if there is no tomorrow We need only to look at the economics of land and in times of plenty as well as times of less the environment has been degraded in both One could conclude the environment is doomed no matter which way the economic cycle curves The greatest hope to end this degradation lies within the consciousness of humankind These short stories and essays are not only therapy for me but also an attempt to awaken this consciousness in the reader The ecologically dead or dying will take this as an intrusion into their freedom to destroy develop pollute miseducate and tame our Wisconsin landscape Those still alive to the fact that we are part of that landscape not conquerors of it will find optimism and determination to save our beloved Wisconsin These short stories and essays were all written out on a restored forty acre prairie over a period of Wisconsin s four seasons a place where I find refuge from our society s advancement There I find solitude while restoring and studying those things that humankind appears to have forgotten My Wisconsin prairie is a cultural protest to pres