We are very excited to announce that registration for the Building a Land Ethic Conference is now open! We hope that you’ll join us in Baraboo from August 12-15. We have a great schedule planned, and thanks to a generous gift from Estella Leopold and sponsorship support from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service, registration rates are very reasonable as well.
After attending the nineteenth American Game Conference in New York in 1932, Aldo Leopold wrote, “Conferences like this present a danger, as well as an opportunity. As we sit in our compact circle of mutual understanding, we may possibly forget that there is such a thing as a sporting attitude toward other groups, as well as toward game and toward each other. Above all, it is the essence of both sportsmanship and science habitually to doubt our own ability to truly understand all that we see in nature.”
Aldo Leopold and colleagues at a Midwest Wildlife Conference in 1940.
To Leopold, a conference was a time to come together with like-minded individuals to discuss the pertinent issues of the day, but also a time to challenge one another to think about reaching beyond that “circle of mutual understanding” to think about how to engage a wider and more diverse audience, including those who may approach the issues from a completely different perspective.
Damon Yeh and Masi Mejia discuss different perspectives on Leopold’s land ethic at an event convened by the Aldo Leopold Foundation at the Murie Center in Wyoming last summer.
That’s what a thinking community really is at its core— a group of people with diverse perspectives and ideas who come together to listen to and learn from one another, but that are also willing to “habitually doubt (their) own ability to understand all that (they) see.” The power in that is how the willingness to doubt opens things up beyond that “compact circle” and looks outside– for insights, for new ideas, and for alternate truths. That’s the kind of community we hope to convene at our Building a Land Ethic: Teaching and Learning Across Boundaries conference this summer.
Will you join us? And who else will you invite to the table to help us think about how we build a land ethic in the 21st century?
Sign up before July 3 to get the early bird discount. We hope to see you in August!
