UW-Arboretum Place-Based Workshop

The CHE Place-Based Workshop planning committee invites all CHE associates to this year’s place-based workshop at the UW Arboretum.

We’re staying local this year, which gives us an opportunity to take a deep, immersive dive into a single place, one close at hand that is part of the university. We hope to draw a large group this year for three days of place-based immersive activities.

There will be a kick-off dinner on Monday evening (May 13) followed by three full days of activities, which will be more fully detailed at the time of registration in mid-April. Grab-and-go breakfasts, lunches, and snacks will be provided throughout the workshop for those who register in advance. Because the activities are all based in Madison, transportation to the Arboretum and lodging will not be provided.

Workshop Description

2024 marks the 90th anniversary of UW’s Arboretum. Established in 1934, the Arb was formed in a time of economic, social and environmental crisis, which we associate today with the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. It was here that Aldo Leopold, the first director (then research director), pioneered the concept of ecological restoration, based on the idea of restoring ecological diversity and function. Leopold’s idea of the “land ethic” emerged directly in response to intensive land use practices that, under conditions of environmental stress, made vast swaths of the middle west and the plains uninhabitable. Ecological restoration, Leopold held, restored the landscape to a more natural state, and in the process, represented care for the environment — and a departure from prior conservation practices that focused on land protection or “wise use” of “natural resources.”

The parallels with our present moment explain the reasons for this year’s PBW to be held at the Arboretum. The effects of climate change have reinvigorated thinking about returning to more sustainable practices, which, if they cannot solve everything, can at least help us live better with and within the natural world. Yet we are also facing a reckoning at this moment about the very question of what we preserve and for whom. The Arb’s location on stolen Ho-Chunk land requires a revisiting of important questions about land ethics and biocultural restoration that are as much social and cultural as they are ecological.

Our three days of presentations, workshops, and activities, planned in conjunction with Arb staff, aim to consider the ways in which the Arboretum can continue its research mission as it considers these and other questions. How can CHE’s focus on the complex interplay between culture, history and environment help the Arb foster engagement with its partners, which include the Ho-Chunk Nation, the university, and the broader Madison community?

Goals of This Year’s Workshop

• Build CHE community by exchanging ideas in place
• Marshal CHE’s extraordinary range of humanists, social, biological and physical sciences to engage with and reflect on the Arboretum’s past and consider how it bears on pressing issues of the present and future
• Examine the continuing evolution of land ethics, the role of the Arboretum in that evolution, the relationship of the Arboretum to its various communities, and how place-based “community science” can help shape its future

If you have questions, please feel free to email Anna Andrzejewski, faculty coordinator of this year’s workshop, at avandrzejews@wisc.edu.