Backyard ecologist featured at Madison conference

Gardener and natural science writer Sara Stein will give a presentation entitled, “Homeground Ecology 101,” at the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting in Madison Sunday, Aug. 5, at 5 p.m.

The free public event will be in the Madison Ballroom, Monona Terrace Convention Center.

Stein’s books include “My Weeds,” a gardener’s botany, and “Noah’s Garden,” which relates the ecological restoration of her property in suburban New York. A sequel, “Planting Noah’s Garden,” describes her further pursuits in backyard ecology, and explains how to transform the traditional, lawn-bound home garden into natural habitat.

“Noah’s Children: Restoring the Ecology of Childhood,” published in June by Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, explores a child’s need to be connected with natural habitats, for children’s own sake and for the sake of all of our futures.

Stein has been credited with heralding the backyard biodiversity movement of the last decade. A longtime author, Stein began writing about her own land management adventures in the early 1990s.

While researching one of her books, she was surprised to realize that many of the once familiar inhabitants of her own property were no longer there. Her research into the reasons for the plants’ and animals’ absence inspired her well-known volume on the importance of local ecosystems, “Noah’s Garden.”

Her work has been compared to that of Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and Henry Thoreau, and her books have often translated some of the toughest ecological science into a plain language that has been embraced by non-scientists everywhere.

Stein’s lecture will take place during the Ecological Society of America’s 86th annual meeting, and is one of many sessions which will focus on the theme of “Keeping all the Parts: Preserving, Restoring, and Sustaining Complex Ecosystems.”

Stephen Carpenter, Halverson Professor of Limnology and professor of zoology at UW–Madison, is president of the Ecological Society of America. The society’s members hail from academia, government agencies, industry and nonprofit organizations.