Wild Reads

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Wild Reads is where we share stories about and from partners, landowners, and friends throughout the conservation community. Let us know if you have a story, book review, poem, or photos to share. We don't promise to publish everything we receive, but we'd love to know what you're reading, writing, and what you think is worth sharing.

Conservancy Stories
News Releases
LA CROSSE, WI – In thinking about the La Crosse area, one of the first images that comes to mind is the iconic bluffs. They’re visible by boaters on the…
Decoding the Driftless is a short (about 1 hour) documentary about the very area in which the name suggests, The Driftless Area. The Driftless Area is a region in the…
If nature was destroyed, how could we know it? In Forest 404, the main character, Pan, discovers nature as a world long destroyed, and she wonders how she can connect…
“The Myth of the Rain” is a short story written by Seanan McGuire in an anthology titled Loosed Upon the World, edited by John Joseph Adams. “The Myth of the…
Craig Santos Perez’s Habitat Threshold is a collection of climate poetry that was published in 2020. Perez is many things including a poet, scholar, artist as well as an environmentalist…
Everything in nature is connected, and humans cannot be separated from the ecological systems upon which we depend. Although our modern Western society often forgets the bond humans have to…
Book Reviews
In this expansive documentary starring Leonardo DiCaprio, he explores himself, the environment, and many communities of people on a search for a healthier Earth. In, Before the Flood (2016) presented…
Conservancy Stories
Book Reviews
Climate change is the largest issue we as humans have ever faced. The book All We Can Save is a collection of essays and poems from authors at the forefront…
American poet, scholar, and editor Juliana Spahr (b. 1966) offers a critical contribution to climate poetry with her solastalgic—feelings of environmental anxiety or distress and confusion—yet visceral, call-to-action piece entitled…
Hikes
Sightings
On September 25, I had a wonderful evening hiking the ridgetop trail of Tunnelville Cliffs. Kickapoo Valley Reserve astroeducators Susan Cushing and Barbara Sarnowski led a group of twenty trekkers…
Wendell Berry was born in rural Henry County, Kentucky in 1934. He studied at Stanford University, took a Guggenheim Fellowship to France and Italy, taught English in the Bronx... and…
In a world without pollinators, we give up blooming flowers to celebrate the coming of spring. We give up the taste of our fresh fall bounties. We give up the…
Here's how two retired college professors became honored members of Mississippi Valley Conservancy's Bluffland Guardians – a story 50 years in the making. In the spring of 1971, 15 Knox…
Conservancy Stories
As an accredited land trust, we are required to visit the properties we protect once a year to ensure that we're upholding our commitment to landowners to protect their land…