The Driftless Reader
Editor, Curt Meine, and a panel of contributors read from and discuss of The Driftless Reader. Ancient glaciers passed by the Driftless Area and waterways vein its interior, forming an enchanting, enigmatic landscape of sharp ridgetops and deep valleys. Across time, this rugged topography has been home to an astonishing variety of people: Sauk, Dakota, and Ho-Chunk villagers, Norwegian farmers and Mexican mercado owners, Dominican nuns and Buddhist monks, river raftsmen and Shakespearean actors, Cornish miners and African American barn builders, organic entrepreneurs and Hmong truck gardeners.
The Driftless Reader gathers writings that highlight the unique natural and cultural history, landscape, and literature of this region that encompasses southwestern Wisconsin and adjacent Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. The more than eighty selected texts include writings by Black Hawk, Mark Twain, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Frank Lloyd Wright, Aldo Leopold, David Rhodes, and many other Native people, explorers, scientists, historians, farmers, songwriters, journalists, and poets. Paintings, photographs, maps, and other images complement the texts, providing a deeper appreciation of this region's layered natural and human history.
Curt Meine
Curt Meine is a conservation biologist, environmental historian, and writer based in Sauk County, Wisconsin. He serves as Senior Fellow with the Aldo Leopold Foundation (Baraboo, WI) and the Center for Humans and Nature (Libertyville, IL); as Research Associate with the International Crane Foundation (Baraboo, WI); and as Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For more than three decades he has worked with a wide array of organizations at the intersection of conservation, agriculture, water, climate change, environmental justice, and community resilience. Meine has authored and edited several books, including the award-winning biography Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (1988/2010) and The Driftless Reader (2017). He served as on-screen guide in the Emmy Award-winning documentary film Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time (2011). In his home
landscape, he is a founding member of the Sauk Prairie Conservation Alliance.