Wisconsin Book Festival: Land & Home

The Aldo Leopold Foundation is proud to sponsor the Land & Home event series at the Wisconsin Book Festival this October. Please join us in listening to a great line-up of speakers in Madison on Oct. 15-19.

As residents of our particular places and of the planet, how do we experience, celebrate, and change the places that we live? The events featured below bring together writers and readers who celebrate our environment, raise profound questions, poke fun, and share what they hope for and what they love about our land. They are part of the Wisconsin Humanities Council’s Wisconsin: Making It Home programming. This multi-year initiative invites citizens to explore the state’s environmental history, celebrate Wisconsin’s rich conservation heritage, and talk with one another about present and future relationships between the people and places that we call home.

Andrew Revkin and David Orr: Earth Lessons

Andrew Revkin’s highly acclaimed science writing for the New York Times has helped readers unravel the realities and debates surrounding many pressing environmental concerns, most notably climate change. Ethics, culture, design, and education are all pieces of the sustainability puzzle in David Orr’s passionate scholarship, teaching and writing about the environment.

Voices from the Heart of the Land/Sand Country Memories

Richard L. Cates’ collection of the reminiscences, observations and opinions of older community members from Arena township in southern Wisconsin celebrates a vision of stewardship and a way of life that is disappearing. Speaking from the landscape of Wisconsin’s northwest pine barrens, Susan Gilchrist’s oral histories from residents of the region are imbued with the sense of this particular landscape and reveal the richness of our connections to the land.

A Half-Century of Change in Rural Wisconsin

Jerry Apps, Justin Isherwood, and Jim Pope are three of the Wisconsin authors who have done the most to celebrate and preserve stories of Wisconsin’s rural life and heritage. In this event they come together to discuss the significant change that has taken place in the state’s culture and agriculture over the past fifty years.

ECOpreneuring: Putting Purpose and the Planet Before Profits

Lisa Kivirist and John Ivanko, leaders in the green business movement, ask what role businesses can play in the restoration and preservation of Wisconsin’s environment. Come and be inspired by stories of people blending dedication to the environment with creative ways of making a living.

Lake Effect: Two Sisters and a Town’s Toxic Legacy

In this compelling memoir, journalist Nancy A. Nichols keeps the deathbed promise she made to her sister, to investigate and tell the story of the toxic waste sites in their hometown of Waukegan, Illinois and the possible effects of these chemicals on residents’ health. Scientifically accurate and poignant, Nichols’s story challenges us to ask why we allow thousands of chemicals into our food, our environment, and our bodies.

Meet Me at the Fair

County fairs: giant pumpkins? pie judges? rodeo queens? 4-H kids? All these and more are found in the stunning photographs and stories of Purebred and Homegrown: America’s County Fairs. Authors Drake Hokanson and Carol Kratz capture the many ways that county fairs have helped to define Americans as free-thinking, self-reliant, community-focused people.

State by State: Why This is Home

Inspired by the WPA American Guide series, State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America brings together new work by fifty of our foremost writers, painting a fresh portrait of America in our time. The collection, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, is by turns humorous, insightful, and poignant, and includes reportage and memoir by authors including Dave Eggers, Louis Erdrich and Ann Patchett. (who is actually going to be here???—AJC will fill in)

The Coming Water Crisis

Is access to water a human right? Or is water a commercial product to be bought and sold? Maude Barlow argues for an international water covenant that would protect water as a human right in Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, the sequel to her bestseller, Blue Gold.

For the Love of a Farm

Beloved chronicler of rural Wisconsin, Jerry Apps, returns with Old Farm: A History, the story of his family’s farm from the distant past of the ice age to the present day. The beauty of the place and the family’s loving care for it echo the passion of generations of Wisconsinites for our landscape and the ways we live upon it.

Paul R. and Anne H. Ehrlich: The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment

From these cutting edge scientists comes a book that spans the world’s history, weaving a story of both cultural and biological evolution that both illuminates and presses us to consider humans’ domination of the Earth and our impact on the environment. Just as their 1968 book The Population Bomb provoked widespread discussion and concern, this new work promises to stimulate, educate, and move readers concerned about the future of the species and the planet.

Wisconsin Food Originals

Two of Wisconsin’s best-known food lovers talk about and let you sample some of the state’s most unusual and tastiest foods. Bergin’s Hungry for Wisconsin: A Tasty Guide for Travelers will be a Wisconsin road trip necessity. With the children’s book Mustard on a Pickle, Mt. Horeb Mustard Museum owner Barry Levenson introduces kids to new foods.

The National Endowment for the Humanities generously supports the Wisconsin Book Festival.