Steady-State Origins in Sauk County

By Dave Rollo

As the setting for Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Sauk County, Wisconsin, holds a special place within the pantheon of environmental literature. Leopold’s writings on ecology and forestry brought an understanding of land repair and remediation to academic and general audiences. It is difficult to imagine the fields of wildlife biology, soil conservation, or restoration ecology without Leopold’s contribution.

Likewise, the moral basis for the environmental movement in later decades owes its origins in part to Leopold’s land ethic.


A Trophic Perspective on Fossil Fuels

by Alix Underwood

Like the economy of nature, the human economy has a “trophic” structure. In nature, nutrition and energy flow from plants to herbivores to carnivores, with each of these comprising a trophic level of the ecosystem. In the human economy, materials and energy flow from agriculture and other extractive activities to heavy manufacturing to light manufacturing. Both economies include service providers, such as pollinators in nature and the transportation sector in the human economy.


Democracy Trumped at the Limits to Growth

by Brian Czech

Perhaps you’ve heard: Autocracy is on the march. Not just in the obvious places like Russia, China, and North Korea. Democracy has been declining throughout the world for decades, sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly, but invariably replaced by autocratic tendencies, politicians, and states.

What’s going on in places as far-flung as Hungary, Myanmar, and Nicaragua? Why, after the lessons of world wars, the Cold War,