Where Ecological Restoration Began
Near Madison, Wisconsin
In nineteen thirty-two, the University of Wisconsin began purchasing a stretch of badly degraded land south of campus, old farms and logged-over lots along the western shore of Lake Wingra. The university's purpose was unlike any before it in the history of American conservation: not simply to protect nature, but to rebuild it from scratch.
Aldo Leopold was at the center of the project. By nineteen thirty-three he had been hired as research director of the new arboretum, the first professor of game management in the United States. His vision, which he articulated on the day the arboretum was formally dedicated in June nineteen thirty-four, was to reconstruct a sample of old Wisconsin, the prairies and oak savannas and wetlands that had covered the landscape before European settlement. Not a museum. Not a garden. An ecological laboratory.
The ambition was radical. No one had tried to restore a lost plant community before. The prevailing view in ecology was that damaged lands recovered on their own if you simply left them alone. Leopold argued the opposite: that active, informed restoration was both possible and necessary. Working with crews from the Civilian Conservation Corps, the arboretum began the painstaking work of replanting prairie grasses, reintroducing savanna species, managing fire, removing invasive plants that had taken over the abandoned fields.
Curtis Prairie, established in the late nineteen thirties, is now considered the oldest continuously managed restored prairie in the world. The methods developed here, the use of prescribed fire, seed propagation, aggressive invasive removal, became the foundational techniques of the ecological restoration movement worldwide.
The arboretum was designated a National Historic Landmark in two thousand twenty-one, not for any building on the site but for the ideas that originated here. It covers twelve hundred acres today, a working laboratory where students and researchers continue refining the science that Leopold and his colleagues invented in the nineteen thirties when they looked at a stretch of exhausted farmland and decided to bring back what had been lost.
