Category: CULTIVATE

Acorns hit the forest floor, squirrels rustle in the leaves and traffic from Interstate 41 blends into a constant hum. An occasional siren wails from an ambulance at the nearby Milwaukee Regional Medical Center in Wauwatosa, a suburb west of Milwaukee. The ruins of what was once the Milwaukee County Insane Asylum, first established in…

Jennifer Nelson started to learn about conservation when she was a child in her mom’s garden.  When she grew up, Nelson and her partner bought farmland where trees, flowers, perennials, veggies and native grasses grew, and she spent nearly 15 years as an organic vegetable and cut flower grower. But health problems kept Nelson from…

Skip Blanc grew up in Gladstone, Michigan, where he was taught the importance of wild rice from a young age. As a member of the Brothertown Indian Nation, Blanc experienced firsthand the relationship between tribal nations and wild rice.  “Rice is very important to most of the tribes around here,” Blanc says. “It not only…

The walls of the Wisconsin Supreme Court are decorated with murals marking important moments in legal history: the reign of Caesar Augustus Octavius, the granting of the Magna Carta and the signing of the U.S. Constitution.  The fourth depicts a smaller moment in world history but an important one for Wisconsin. The right wall displays…

On a crisp autumn morning, a clementine-sized bird flew into my car window opening and, in a partially concussed daze, trapped itself. Without hesitation, Meido Moore, the abbot of a Rinzai Zen monastery called Korinji, near the Wisconsin Dells in the central part of the state, made his way over to my car. He cupped…